- #Windows 7 memory monitor at 7gb out of 8 driver#
- #Windows 7 memory monitor at 7gb out of 8 free#
- #Windows 7 memory monitor at 7gb out of 8 windows#
On smaller systems that don't have an excess of free pages you may see periodic reads from the pagefile, and this is expected because the total amount of data referenced by the OS/drivers/processes is larger than the total RAM.
So if the system really has more than enough RAM (like in your second screenshot, where you have 3.6 GB of free pages) you shouldn't see any reads from the pagefile. You can verify this by going to the Disk tab in the resource monitor and looking for any disk IO from pagefile.sys.
#Windows 7 memory monitor at 7gb out of 8 windows#
By the way, Windows doesn't use pagefiles as "extra memory", it uses them as a backing store for private pages, just like regular files are used as a backing store for EXEs/DLLs and memory mapped files. The maximum size can either be set to the same value as the minimum, or you can make it larger so that the system is more resilient to memory leaks or unexpectedly high loads. This will make sure the pagefile is created once and then stays at the same size forever, so it can't fragment. If you think you are in that 0.1% and your pagefile might be getting fragmented, you can manually increase its minimum size such that the total system commit charge stays below 80% even if you run all your apps at once (80% is the threshold at which the pagefile is automatically extended). For win7 we have telemetry data that shows that even for systems with 1 GB of RAM, less than 0.1% of all boot sessions end up having to extend the pagefile, and this number is even lower for larger amounts of RAM.
Pagefile fragmentation (at the filesystem level) can only occur when the initially chosen size is not large enough and the system has to extend it at run time. Allowing the system to manage the size of the pagefile actually works well in most cases. On the other hand, if it's a case of some application allocating a lot of memory and not using it for a long time, then increasing the pagefile might be a perfectly valid solution.
If it's an unbound memory leak then increasing the size of the pagefile will simply allow the system to run longer before it eventually hits the maximum pagefile size limit, or runs out of disk space. Whether this would "fix" the problem or not depends on what the actual problem is. Standby pages are considered part of "available memory", because they can be reused for some other purpose if necessary. If you increase the size of the pagefile the system will write most of these pages to disk and then move them from the modified list to the standby list. Matthew, The only reason why these pages are kept on the modified list indefinitely is because the system doesn't have any available pagefile space left.
#Windows 7 memory monitor at 7gb out of 8 driver#
(However, if it does turn out to be a memory leak then the pagefile will eventually become full anyway, so you'll need to close the leaking app, or if it's a driver leak, reboot the system). If you sort the processes by Commit Size do you see any particularly big ones? If yes, do you expect them to be using that much memory? Also, have you disabled or reduced the default pagefile size? If yes, you can set it back to "system managed" and that will allow the system to recover physical memory by moving unused pages to the pagefile. The pagefile is not large enough for the system to move all this unused memory to disk. Often (but not always) this is due to a memory leak in the app. Some app (or multiple apps) allocated a lot of memory, and is not actively using most of it. The fact that most of your memory is in this state means two things: 1. Modified memory is memory that was allocated by some application and then removed from the application's working set, usually because it hasn't been used for a long time.