Thinkpads Forum

Is it reasonable that my pagefile sys size is 7.93 GB and my hibrfil sys file is 5.94 GB?

Geophyte1 wrote:Is it reasonable that my pagefile sys size is 7.93 GB and my hibrfil sys file is 5.94 GB?

It actually depend how much RAM you got installed in your computer. More RAM then the hiberfil will increase in size as well. The hiberfil.sys should be able to store what's in the computers memory when you hibernate so that basically explain why more RAM will result in a larger hiberfil.sys. If you don't user hibernate then you can type "powercfg -n off" from command prompt to remote the hiberfil.sys and disable hibernation. Change "off" to "on" if you want to turn the feature on again.
I'm not sure what the exact rules are for the pagefile, but i do belive the default will create a pagefile that is 1.5 times the RAM installed if you got less than 2gb of RAM. If 2gb RAM or more i think the default is a pagefile equal to the amount of RAM installed. There is a lot of opinions about the pagefile so i don't know what the best settings are if you got 8gb of RAM installed which i believe is the case here. I would think that if you got 8gb of ram and your system is never close to using all the RAM then a large pagefile shouldn't be necessary. If you will gain anything by decreasing the size except saving some diskspace i don't know, but you can change it if you want. Even if you got more than enough RAM installed there might be a good reason why Microsoft still recommend to keep a large pagefile.sys, i don't really know. I just kept the defualt on my computer.

You can find some info from Microsoft here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889654

Even if it says nothing about Windows Vista, 7 and 2008 i believe this rule still apply for newer OS. It won't do any damage to try out some settings for the pagefile since you can easily change it back, but i don't know what the recommended settings are except from what Microsoft says. For the hiberfil.sys you cannot change the size, but you can disable hibernation as explained above.

Thanks for the information. I do have 8 gig of ram and at the moment I'm not pressed for disc space so I'll let it ride.

Another consideration is whether an SSD is used. With an SSD, a pagefile becomes much faster and may make sense to avoid any bottlenecks in memory usage.