Magic Man (8/19/2010)

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Why set a size and constrain the memory manager in the first place?. Set the pagefile as system managed, it will be set to an initial size and can grow with extents if required.

And it's always a good idea to retain a pagefile, however much RAM you have since you'll never really have more than enough. Disabling it or setting it low means that the memory manager is constrained doing its job and is forced to keep unbacked pages in memory rather than page them out to the pagefile.

I'd disagree as to the frequency of paging since pre-caching will tend to cause ununused memory pages to be dropped. The OS will only store non backed pages in the page file, memory pages that are backed on disk via memory mapped files, e.g. .exe, .dll files etc. have no need to be paged to the pagefile - pages will just be dropped as required and paged back in directly from the file.

Pagefile fragmentation is also a non issue.