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Is disabling win7 swapfile dangerous?

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peter-h:
This is recommended for machines which want to minimise SSD wear. Lots of people recommend it for winXP, which seems to trash SSDs faster than anything else - see here

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/programming/windows-inter-app-messaging-and-32-bit-apps-under-win7-64/

But surely it should apply to any SSD application.

The obvious gotcha is that you need enough RAM for the worst case situation. But how can that be determined? For example would a machine running win7-64 in 4GB RAM be "safe" when the perf monitor is showing just 1.5GB being used? I know some apps leak memory...

RoGeorge:
I used to disable the Windows swap all the time, even with WinXP, before the SSD.  Did the same with WinXP, Win7, Win10.  Don't recall any problems.

peter-h:
It seems to be a complex topic because the swapfile is also used for other stuff e.g. inter process comms!

Postal2:

--- Quote from: peter-h on October 08, 2024, 06:36:36 am ---.... I know some apps leak memory...

--- End quote ---
You can't just disable swap-file, because it dramatically reduces reliability - that's where everything that leaks is dumped. You just need to install another SSD, possibly switched to SLC (but not necessarily), and direct swap-file to it.

You can use your previous SSDs, which were the main ones and failed, as swap-file.

I haven't tried it, but I suspect that setting the swap-file size to a deliberately large size will increase reliability.

Jeroen3:
What is this pc used for, fairly static and light stuff or full applications and browsers?

Pagefile is important to keep things going when programs ask for memory but don't use it (chrome).
If you don't have it on, all memory will be allocated and there is a hard limit. Things will crash if you hit this limit, because nobody checks if malloc returns null.
For example, my 32 GB RAM laptop currenty has 17 GB of real memory used, and 24 GB in pagefile!

It is also used for fault dumps.. anyway I would recommend not messing with it unless you are absolutely certain you have enough physical memory to handle peak load and no programs depend on it.

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