Brendan (btrotter.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 22, 2020 3:32 am wrote:

> The right way to think about the way memory management works in Windows (unless swap is
> disabled by an idiot) is to think of physical memory as nothing more than a cache of the
> page file; where "max. virtual memory size = page file size". Physical memory size and
> physical memory availability are irrelevant - they have no effect on OOM whatsoever.

No, that's not right (you may be right for some older Windows version, but I'm pretty sure even 2000 didn't work like that). By default, Windows allocates very small page file, especially on a system with large RAM. Like I wrote in the other post, on 64 GB system, page file was 9 GB[1].

What's worse, Windows can't automatically increase the page file size fast enough to answer raising memory demands. It is to be expected that some allocations will fail while page file is being resized (this actually makes the strategy to wait for a while and try to allocate again somewhat sensible on Windows, though I would only consider that with custom allocator, which probably 99 % of software doesn't have).

[1] This is very sensible on current laptops, where SSD isn't all that much larger compared to RAM. For example, my laptop wasn't available (from where I bought it) with larger than 500 GB SSD, but I do have 32 GBs of RAM. Would be rather annoying, if I'd had to use something like 32-64 GBs for page file.

-JLarja