Page file size windows 2008 R2

pagefilewindows-server-2008

We are deploying physical windows servers (460c/Gen8/128GB RAM/300GB HDD) if I implement the page file, following the best practice of 1.5 times the ram, its going to take up the complete disk almost, so with such a large amount of RAM will it be necessary to have a page file that follows the normal windows way.

Best Answer

There are a few things to consider here.

  1. If you don't have a pagefile the size of RAM + 257 MB, you cannot get a full crash dump. If you set it too low, you can hit OOM conditions.

  2. You can also leave it at "system managed" and measure what the system is going to do with it.

  3. The 1.5x RAM recommendation is old and no longer makes sense. I would throw that out of the window and forget it ever existed.

So now you have to ask yourself:

Do you care about a full crash dump? No, probably not. Minidumps are fine in almost all cases and very few people take the time to actually analyze or understand crash dumps.

Can you forecast memory utilization in your system? If you can, you can estimate how large to set the pagefile to with some extra space built in as a cushion. I'm guessing that if you could do this, you wouldn't have asked this question.

Is the answer to the previous two questions "no"? If so, just go with System Managed and keep an eye on it, because you'll get yourself in trouble otherwise.

Related Topic