Page File slowly continuously increasing...

Hi all,

First time here - hope someone can help me out. I have a situation where my PC's page file (PF Usage via Task Manager) is steadily and continually getting bigger and bigger... so much so that the pop-up dialogue appears telling me that Windows will have to do something about it.

This isn't normal behaviour and it has only started happening recently. I've done a HJT, MBAM, Spybot, Windows Defender, SuperAntiSpyware and Symantec AV... all tell me it's pretty clean (a few tracking cookies here and there).

The page file rises from about 700MB (which seemed a bit high to begin with) and eventually gets to 2.04GB.

I found that if I terminate the explorer.exe process it drops right back down again - I then restart explorer.exe and it starts to slowly climb back upwards.

Currently it is at 1.35GB and I'm doing nothing other than typing this thread.

...I waited 10 seconds - doing absolutely nothing - and it is now at 1.36GB. I just killed explorer.exe and it's dropped to 1.03GB and is remaining steady. I've just restarted explorer.exe and it's slowly, but inexorably, rising again.

Any guidance appreciated on this one.

Oh, XP SP3, Thinkpad T40, 1GB of RAM.

Hippo

 

Greetings, Hippogriff...

I'll start throwing some ideas while we hash this out...

You might try turning off any search indexing, any backup jobs, etc...

Take a look at Control Panel, System, Advanced settings (I'm on a W7 machine, but your path should be similar)...get into advanced Performance settings, and give us an idea of what's appearing in your Virtual Memory settings...

Do you see the same symptoms in Safe Mode? If not, you might try selectively disabling/enabling Startup entries...

I'll do some digging - keep us posted...

 

Hi, Hippo,

I have no idea why your page file keeps increasing, other than if you're letting Windows manage it, who knows what could happen?

You might find the following somewhat informative
http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm.
It talks about how to monitor page file usage with TM and System Monitor (a built-in tool you should have on your PC, at least with XPPro). It also discusses the pros and cons of various page file lower and upper limits, setting your page file's limits or whether to keep it a constant size, etc. It also helps you determine what the page file should be for your system, depending on what you do.

I have XP Pro SP3 with 1GB ram and a long time ago I fixed the page file's size at a constant 2GB and have had no problems by doing so. 2GB is probably way conservative---I might get by with as little as 1.25GB but I haven't investigated it. A general rule of thumb is to set the page file to 1.5X the physical ram amount, but again, it depends on what you use your PC for.

Hope this helps a little!

 

Just a quick update...

- Process Explorer didn't help me cast any light on this
- Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Performance shows the PageFile counters rising, but I can't see what it's attributable to
- Process Monitor may well be able to help me; it shows what files are opened by what processes and what actions are taken

At the moment, I am on another computer at home. I will be back in the office tomorrow but I have had a quick look at Process Monitor and one thing that I've not seen on this computer is any access to the Page File itself (c:\pagefile.sys) so I'm wondering whether Process Monitor will be useful when I try it on the other computer tomorrow.

I shall give it a go and report back.

 

Ah, wouldn't you know it? I've just noticed in the Process Monitor Filter that there is an entry for Path, Ends With, pagefile.sys and it is excluded. So, if I enable that, then I hope to see pagefile.sys being accessed (hopefully a lot on the 'unhealthy' computer).

Although on this 'healthy' computer, running without that filter exclusion has not shown up any accesses to pagefile.sys so far.

We shall see.

Hippo

P.S. - I tell a lie, there is now a single access to c:\pagefile.sys in Process Monitor a "ReadFile" and it shows what process did it. I hope I will now be able to use this on the computer I'm having issues with to find out what is accessing c:\pagefile.sys all the time and growing it.