What is the Optimal Virtual Memory Size

Thank you for all your videos! Quick question, is there a way to reduce system VRAM usage that doesn't cause instability?

Agreed, to let Windows manage it on its own, Brian.

Thanks for confirming something I've always thought. You get so many 'experts' quoting these magic pill solutions, using weird formulas and buzzwords to make it sound like they know what they're on about, when clearly they don't. One thing I constantly hear people bang on about is 'memory leaks', are these real, or just another 'expert' buzzword!? Whenever a game causes an issue, out they come "There's a memory leak!". Can they prove it!? Well, they like to think they can!

For HDD, this is very useful as it helps to mitigate fragmentation.

Classic man. I was bought up on VMS (Virtual Memory System - DEC) and Windows NT 3.5. Paging is part of the architecture of the OS, It's almost like trying to turn off the Kernel on Linux lol. Paging is meant to happen be it a hard fault or a soft fault. My advice has always been, if you concerned about paging affecting your performance then buy more memory you will still page but you can reduce your hard paging to disk although it will increase your soft paging to memory, which is fine.

stop poati g stupid woman on thumbnail, its not funny

I've been wondering about this a lot and never got convincing answers.

Its not worth changing the swap file for modern hardware, and disabling it can cause trouble because of the way some applications work, as some actually make use of the page file, not only that your setting a hard limit which will guarantee a blue screen when it exceeds it.
In days of w9x running a fixed size page file of between 1.5 to 3.5 was beneficial, as having a small start size and a larger max size lead to fragmentation of the swap file owing to it growng and shrinking on demand slowing it down the spinning disk.. - best thing to do is leave it well alone as windows expects to find it... and it only uses as much as it needs

I had to adjust my paging file due to recieving "Out of Memory" errors while playing Vermintide. My PC has 16Gb (DDR4) of physical ram, and 1Gb of vram on an integrated GPU but was encountering out of memory and other errors while playing graphically intensive/ memory demanding games. I increased my page file exactly as he described doing so in this video (according to Microsoft's reccomendation) prior to this video coming out, and have not received any errors since while playing "demanding" games. Good video, as it was informative and helped verify that I did things correctly.

I'd like your opinion on this idea.
My system is rather old with PCIe v2.0 with RAM fully filled up to it's maximum of 32 GB. I do plan on moving to a new PCIe 5.0 motherboard some time in the next year, so my plan is to use a PCIe Card to mount a NVMe strip as a separate drive and move the Page File to this drive and make the Page File the size of the drive.
I plan on using a SATA 3.0 based SSD for the O/S drive leaving my three(3) Spindles just for File storage.
Is soon as I get a new motherboard, CPU & RAM I will then turn this current system in to a file server.

My plan is also to get a Rpi 'Pi-Hole' system as soon as the Rpi 4 prices get back to normal and use a NVMe M.2 for it's storage. Without loading all of those ads in the background, my Browser & eMail should speed up.

I came here in hope of a solution to a software that's using 90 to 100 percentage of my physical memory but this is probably not a great fix for it.
Maybe time to double my 16GB RAM in November or December when prices crash.

I still have trouble understanding the difference between virtual memory and page file (or is it the same?) and the memory used on a disc and cache. I’ve read a bit but still confused, any good resources for a non IT person like me?

Thank you so much for clarifying this concept!

There is one reason why I would you use this is when playing games using UE4 and getting the low ram memory error, this is a known issue when playing games using UE4. I have 32gb ddr4 cl16 3600M/ts memory with a 5900X and an RTX 4090, and I was getting this error whilst playing Hogwarts Legacy, I edited the page file using the x 1.5 method and its stopped the game crashing with low ram error. As I say it is a known issue with some games using the UE4 gam engine.

I have 32gb of RAM and pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys were about 25GB. Since I use Windows + Linux in a 128gb SSD I was running out of space. I put the max size to 1GB and until now it's all good.

i havent used this yet and already getting bluescreens because of ram

Spectacular video, exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

Great video to the point clearing the air on this subject

Was wondering if you have a video or can do a video on Ms config using all cores and threads or let Windows manage them

Letting the system take care of that by itself is optimal, you can also create a second paging file in the D or data drive as well as download and play most games from the D drive.

What is the pro and con of maxmize the virtual ram? Thank you.

Lotta folks are messing around with this right now due to long load times of halo infinite being related to these settings regardless of up to date hardware.

Ive found matching the page file maximum with the installed ram does increase the efficiency. Bumping the initial size at 60% to create a target index. All together, Offloading hefty tasks in the background should help considerably. Bumping virtual ram is very much like adding racing fuel to a car that isnt made for racing-- its doAble but a stretch. Useful? Yes; To make ends meet with budget limitations. Example. 8gb installed ram: Match with approx 8000mb of vRam, with the initial size of 5200mb. For an exact calculation; in task manager look at Available Memory* this number shows up as less than installed ram as the cache bank and other system needs' take up space at boot. 8gb would be approx 7gb of usable memory. Goodluck

It is people like younthat actually makes the world turn. !God bless you, Sir!🍎

alright that's it, i am only watching englishmen for these istructional videos. clear, concise, and easy to follow. seriously, why are computer people so terrible at communicating these things...
cheers 🍻

i think the main pro from setting this up manually is that windows works with way to small lows, and we fix this by making a good mini such as the one u recommend using. making the transitions smother and less reactive, causing less stutters.

I love your videos, from Bri 😂🙏

I have a 4gb ram tablet pc and since a few years ago when I came across this tweak I used the 1.5 times method in the first box and the 3 times method in the second box and it jumped to 9.9 gb in the task manager. I never had a blue screen because of that

Hello Sir,
I have to work on adobe illustrator and my GB ram is 4G.i3 7th generation.Can I use the same method to increase 4gb to 8gb.Kindly reply as I'm totally a non IT person

"8 gb is a pretty normal size for everyone"
I had to pause the video and check which year this was posted, it was not 2010 sadly...

hi. i use after effect and i want to use this for better performance.
my ram is 32gb ddr5 4633mhz cl46 crucial.
my win ssd nvme is 500gb 980pro samsung.
my cache ssd is 970pro plus samsung nvme.
i have also 2tb wd blue hdd for archive.

i set initial to 65536 mb and max to 102400mb.
can this hurt my pc?
because i have multiple internal storage as you said.
thanks if you can confirm this setting for me.

Love your work - thanks for looking after us all !

Thank you for this!!

For me things got fixed with battlefield 2042. I have 16gigs of ram(single channel) i7 12650h and 3070ti . The game used to run in slow mo for some reason, as soon as I increases the v memory size, it almost gor fixed

I use rendering and creation apps that commonly exceed 64gb :P

Muchas gracias 😊

OK so I been doing this my whole afternoon, got me curious

I placed, in both boxes, ram times 1024 times 2

In my old pc (Intel 4gb of ram) was:

4x1024x2

Equals 8 with something

Placed in both boxes, accept and restart

Gave me more disk space, I had 20gb free now 30gb and made my games run faster

NO I'm not kidding, Intel 4gb

On my laptop of 8gb I chose the option that says "system managed size" also made things go faster, even made my crashing rdr2 finally run

Made RDR2 work, Intel 8gb of ram

The automatic option, the first one, made everything go slower

finally someone debunks this nonsense every optimization channel keeps posting. you sound like michael caine. brilliant!

Me da flogera traducir, segun tutoriales habian dicho que no habia ventajas mas alla de 8gb pero yo tengo una laptop antigua asi que hice esto y funciono mejor que con la distribucion de Windows tengo 16 gb ddr3l gracias ❤

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Just let windows manage the pagefile size, commonly with 8GB or RAM windows will create about 3GB page filw which is less than the min. start if we try to create it manually.
I tried different options on different versions of windows with not so good results, some ended of slowing down the OS and other caused BSD.

Mine is set at 1024MB (Let windows decide blah blah blah, box checked) on programs and background services (I have 16Gb Ram/ 2 sticks).

I did have these set at custom levels (I recently changed it back to let windows decide) because I was getting all sorts of problems while gaming (GTA Online) with stuff like this, ERR_MEM_EMBEDDEDALLOC_GUARD_1 and other ERR_MEM problems, so if these problems still happen after I change it back to 'let windows decide' the I obviously need some help.

one reason I've found you have to, is with stable diffusion, with low VRAM.

One year later. Thank you.

Thank you Mr. Britec09. As always - you get to the SPOT! Excellent 👍.

Ya crashes with cyberpunk badly.i got 32 gb and it got worse so ya leave it alone.😅

I trust on windows because the auto mode works best laptop user btw

I have 8 gigs of DDR3-2133, should I tweak it or leave it for the system to manage?

Do you use virtual memory? let me know in comments below.