
That's just Firefox with two windows (dual monitor) each with around 10-15 tabs, that I use almost daily so I can't / don't want to close.
Besides Firefox, there's a VPN connection to my work, an Adobe Acrobat reader opened, and a bittorrent client ...
So 9 GB are currently used, out of 16 GB...
What do you think would happen if I start a video game that uses more than 5-6 GB of memory and I had no swap file? Either the game would constantly hang to load stuff from drive because it can't cache everything in ram, or I'd get warnings from the operating system saying "some application will have to be closed to free memory" and I don't want random firefox processes to be killed for the game.
Should I alter my workflow and my life just to disable page file? That's stupid.
I have a page file that's set as fixed size (4 GB) on my SSD and a secondary (around 12 GB) on a mechanical drive. The 4 GB page file on the SSD is barely accessed, but should there ever be need for it, I know it's there and applications won't crash due to lack of memory.
Also, from time to time I use a RAM drive to speed things up (generation of thumbnails, downloading a web site with lots of pages, indexing lots of text etc - stuff that requires lots of seeking and repeated read/writes works faster in a ram drive) and ram drives will lock portions of ram from applications, so having a page file helps not crash those applications when there's no available free ram.
Yeah, you COULD not use a page file... but it's ridiculous and silly ... just let it be and use a page file.
The argument that it hurts a SSD is stupid ... even a TLC drive with 100 TBW will last 5-10 years with 10+ GB writes a day to the page file ... in 5 years you'd probably buy 2-4 TB SSDs and laugh thinking you think you were worried about the 240-512 GB SSDs endurance.
My boot drive is a 120 GB Sandisk using MLC memory... wrote 36 TB to it and the average erase count across the flash cells is 309 so there's still loads of life in it. ... MLC flash has around 5000 erases and TLC is down to around 1000-3000 .. see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Distinction_between_NOR_and_NAND_flash