High page file usage (2024)

Article
01/11/2017

Question

_{Wednesday, January 11, 2017 7:34 AM}

Hi everyone,

From our monitoring tool i am getting errorHigh page file usage 95 %

My virtual machines memory is 4 GB and during virtual machine creation i have created one drive double the size of my page file i.e 8GB and moved the page file to E drive. Now i can see my page file size 95%

Please guide me how to troubleshoot it.

All replies (9)

_{Saturday, January 21, 2017 1:22 PM ✅Answered}

If the system determines that pages need to go to the page file because you have insufficient memory available, there is not anything you can do. It has to page. If you know that the application would run better with more memory, and you cannot get more memory, you will need to live with the high page file usage.

What do you mean 'clear any cache in pagefile'? The paging algorithm automatically clears 'stale' pages and ensures that the most used pages are available in memory. So 'cache' is in physical memory, not on the page file.

I do not know what that specific registry setting does. I have never been a fan of munging the registry to try to change the behavior of the operating system (if that is what that particular setting does). I would never assume that I know how to make the operating system run better than the engineers who have been working on this for many years.

. : | : . : | : . tim

_{Saturday, January 21, 2017 3:12 PM ✅Answered}

If you know it is an application that is causing the paging, preventing kernel paging is not goingto help the application.The default setting works to your advantage. Your application needs more memory. The default setting allows kernel/driver files to page, freeing up more memory for your application so you application has to page less. Preventing kernel code from paging is telling the system to keep in memory things that may no longer be needed, thereby occupying memory that could be utilized by your application.

Your application needs more memory in order to page less. If you can't increase the size of RAM, you need to free things up. I would not try to play with memory management - lots of really smart engineers have worked on those algorithms for years. Another option is to look at everything else that is taking up memory on the system and see if it is really needed to reside in memory. Here again, the memory manager does a pretty good job of moving things out that aren't needed in order to give memory to the applications that are asking for memory. But if you have some services/agents running that have to run on a regular basis, that means they will be fighting for the same memory you want to give your application. If the service/agent is not needed, it will free up a certain amount of memory.

That is a laborious process. The easiest way is to increase RAM. You say it is not in your hands. I would then find whose hands it is in and have a negotiation session.

. : | : . : | : . tim

_{Thursday, January 12, 2017 7:50 AM}

Hi everyone,
From our monitoring tool i am getting errorHigh page file usage 95 %
My virtual machines memory is 4 GB and during virtual machine creation i have created one drive double the size of my page file i.e 8GB and moved the page file to E drive. Now i can see my page file size 95%
Please guide me how to troubleshoot it.

Hi,

You could follow this blog to analyze high page file usage: