Brendan (btrotter.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 22, 2020 3:28 pm wrote:
> Jukka Larja (roskakori2006.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 22, 2020 6:12 am wrote:
> > 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].
>
> OK; my description was a little incomplete, and could've been more like "think of physical memory
> as nothing more than a cache of the page file; where "max. virtual memory size = page file size",
> and where "page file size" may not be a fixed size and may grow as needed (if possible)."
>
> I probably should've also said "swap size" instead of "page file size" to cover non-default configurations.

Still wrong. Windows is quite happy to run with page file significantly smaller than physical memory (running completely without page file may be stupid for unrelated reasons, of which I'm not that familiar with). That's probably the normal mode of operation with current memory amounts.

> For example, I'm not sure if Windows
> can be configured for multiple swap providers in a sensible way (e.g. a smaller swap
> partition on SSD with higher priority plus a larger swap partition on a slow "rotating
> metal" drive with lower priority, with no "auto-adjust page file size").

I don't know if Windows does anything sensible regarding storage performance with multiple page files, but you can configure one per filesystem, either an automatically managed or manually managed (minimum and maximum size). Swap partitions don't really make sense in Windows, as you'll get constantly spammed by low diskspace warnings for them.

I'm sure there are all sorts of non-normal-user-accessible-options to tune all that.

-JLarja