Need to disable virtual memory if physical memory is sufficient

Problem: 12G memory. If so, how do you Win8 the next steps?

Answer: First correct an erroneous zone, virtual memory can not be disabled. "Virtual memory" should refer to the paging file (paging File,pagefile.sys), which is the operating system that changes some of the virtual memory pages to data stored on disk. The article is longer, you can skip to the last paragraph to see the conclusion.

Let's take a look at the data in the physical memory, I am also 12G memory, the physical memory not only holds the data of the various processes (process private part), there are many read in the file (mapped files), which can be viewed with the tools provided by Microsoft Rammap. The operating system guesses what files you're going to use next, or the processes you run are likely to read and write to the files, and then read the files into memory, and when you really need them, it will be very fast to open those files.

The idea that the paging file is bad is that the data in the paging file needs to be read from the disk, and the read and write speed of the disk is much lower than the memory read and write speed, the page file is closed, forcing all the paging to remain in memory, and can improve performance. It seems to make sense, however, memory should be left to the most needed tasks to use, there is a process is not particularly active, so it is entirely possible to swap his paging to disk, freeing up memory for more needs to use this memory task, or mapping more files to memory to improve the hit rate. This was mentioned in a blog post by a Microsoft technical expert Mark Russinovich.

Another view is that the paging file is not good, the presence of paging files will frequently read and write disk, will reduce the SSD such special disk service life. Microsoft also noted in an article on Windows 7 optimization (Support and Q&a for solid-state drives) that Windows 7 was optimized for SSDs and that the percentage of read and write to paging files is about 40 : 1, most of it is read operation. Read the data are generally relatively small reading, and write operations to write data relatively large, these designs are considered the problem of SSD life.

In addition, it is necessary to rely on the paging file to generate error reports when the system crashes, disabling the paging file will affect this functionality. But with the exception of developers, there may be few people who know how to use bug reports and dump.

To sum up, the presence of paging files is positive and beneficial, at least in Windows 7 or later versions of the system, regardless of the amount of physical memory. How to better schedule and manage memory, this job to Windows to do it themselves, Microsoft engineers to help us do, at least not worse than our own management. As for disabling the paging file, it is OK when and only if there is not enough disk space.