Thanks to all for your help. I did not realize that the size of the pagefile can be dynamically allocated. I'll leave it up to Windows in that case.
System Managed means the PF size is dynamic. Windows increases or decreases its size depending on memory allocated to running processes. With 6GB of RAM, it's entirely possible that 960MB of PF is enough at the moment. If you're to start a virtual machine with 4GB of RAM allocated, you surely will see PF growing
Just be aware that having no paging file at all keeps the memory manager (specifically the modified page writer thread) from being able to "page" dirty memory pages to the paging file if memory pressure dictates. If you have a lot of RAM and a fixed use-case scenario this may not be a problem, but you could end up in a scenario where there isn't a lot of memory pressure, but a lot of previously in-use memory pages are on the standby or modified page list, they won't be paged out and you can end up with an out of memory error in an application or three if they require touching memory pages into it's working set, or worse, a bugcheck if Windows was the "application" that needed more memory pages in it's working set.
It's not a common scenario, but it is a scenario that could happen if you totally disable the paging file. Unless you have a *really* small disk, it would still be better to have a 1GB or larger paging file versus none at all. Most paging operations are still read, not write, and assuming even just somewhat decent hardware, there shouldn't be a performance hit for doing so under normal use case scenarios.
Thank you for the details.
In the end I set the paging to 1GB, better not taking any risks.
I read something about it online and you seem to confirm this.
The pagefile is better set on an SSD since more reads are involved, all goes well.
The system managed pagefile for 16GB RAM is bigger than 8GB if put on a HDD but it's about 5GB for an SSD, so it seems.
I hope the 1GB fixed size is enough, otherwise I'll increase it.
So far there were no issues (VirtualBox VM's were running not using more than 2GB so far), as you said, there is a possibility but depends on memory usage.
Cheers!
I could be wrong on what I say, but I honestly believe that Microsoft could do away with the Page File (which used to be called Swap File)if they wanted to. I believe that the reason MS originally came up with the Swap File was because RAM was so expensive. At one time if you had 4GB of RAM it was considered a lot. So instead of using installed RAM they came up with the Swap File which would use disk space instead of RAM. Now that we have so much installed RAM, it makes me wonder if the Page File is really necessary.Having said that, I realize that I could be incorrect in my easement of things.I would like someone else's thinking on this. I promise that I will not be offended if someone tells me that I am not entirely correct. I'm used to it--my wife tells me that all the time.
There are some apps (mostly older, but they exist) that will complain if they don't find a paging file, but they're also rare. In my experience, 1GB is a good size for systems with 32GB of RAM or less to capture a kernel memory dump, although in certain scenarios this may need to be tweaked if the kernel memory footprint grows larger - I see this on heavily used file servers and Hyper-V servers, for instance). There's not a hard and fast number, of course, as kernel memory footprint is somewhat dynamic since Vista and the advent of 64bit Windows, but if you're running 32GB of RAM or less on a "normal" system for home or business use, 1GB is most often more than enough to capture a kernel memory dump and allow the memory manager to keep things working properly otherwise.