How to change the virtual memory page size

Change the size of the virtual memory paging file

1. Open "System" in Control Panel.

2. On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Performance.

3. Click the Advanced tab in the Performance Options dialog box.

4. Click Change under Virtual memory.

5. Under Drive (Volume label), click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change.

6. Click Custom size under the paging file size of the selected drive, and then type the new paging file size in MB in the initial size (MB) or maximum (MB) box, and then click Settings.

If you reduce the initial or maximum paging file settings, you must restart your computer to see the effects of these changes. Increasing typically does not require a restart of the computer.

Attention

• To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer, or you must be delegated the appropriate permissions. Members of the domain Admins group may perform this procedure if the computer is already joined to a domain. As a security best practice, consider using run as to perform this procedure. For more information, see Default local groups, default groups, and use Run as.

• To open system, click Start, Turn Control Panel, and then double-click System.

To open system from the command line as an administrator, type:

Runas/user:computernameadministrator "rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL sysdm.cpl"

• To have Windows choose the best paging file size, click System managed Size.

• For best performance, do not set the initial size below the recommended minimum size below the total number of paging file sizes for all drives. The recommended size is 1.5 times times the size of the system RAM. Although you may increase the size of the paging file while you are using a program that requires a lot of memory, you should still leave the paging file as the recommended size.

• To delete the paging file, set the initial size and maximum value to zero, or click No paging file. Microsoft strongly recommends that you do not disable or delete the paging file.

• On computers equipped with 8 (or more) processors with maximum RAM capacity, you can improve performance by splitting the paging file into multiple paging files. Each paging file must be on a separate physical disk, and for reliability reasons, each disk must be part of the hardware RAID-5 volume.

• You can use System properties in the Computer Management snap-in to remotely change the size of the virtual memory paging file. For more information, see Related Topics.