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Is there a modifiable equivalent of "swappiness" in Windows 7?

My system has 8GB of RAM which is more than enough for my day-to-day use. I'd like to modify swap behaviour, what *NIX systems call swappiness and set it to 0, as I've done on my Ubuntu machine.

I've searched the Web for this but all answers seem to be for *NIX systems.

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Out of curiousity, is setting the swappiness to a higher or a lower value better? –  Chipperyman Sep 12 '13 at 2:03
It depends on how much RAM you have and how much of it you're using. In my case, setting it to 0 will only swap to the disk to prevent an out of memory error. See this answer on AskUbuntu for more @chipperyman573 –  rath Sep 12 '13 at 2:06
it seems like windows doesn't have an emergency protection against out of memory errors. See the link from my answer. –  wullxz Sep 12 '13 at 2:10
possible duplicate of How to control RAM / swap usage –  Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Apr 27 at 4:58

1 Answer 1

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Under Windows there's something called "pagefile" where the system swaps applications to get the RAM free. I'm currently not at a Windows machine but the steps that Adobe put online here look right (I think Win + Pause is a shortcut to "Advanced System Settings).

Although it is possible to disable the pagefile, there are some concerns about that. For more information read this

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As you say in your comment, Windows indeed seems to have no protection against out-of-memory errors. This leads me to believe there is no "swappiness" equivalent. +1 nevertheless for the interesting new shortcut I've learned, and marked as accepted because the link you posted led me to this article. Cheers –  rath Sep 12 '13 at 2:19
There are many people out there with the page file turned off. The system does toss a few things in there that it will not be using for some time in a way that could be concidered unnessiary. The system isnt likely to "run out of memory" except in situations where the user usually knows what is going on, there is often masses of cache that can be freed up first (assuming it was freed proper). The Reason for not disabling it completly Some Programs will have a Fit, if it is not there. And the errors they toss will not make sence always. –  Psycogeek Sep 12 '13 at 5:16
I have a laptop with 8GB of RAM and have been using with swap off. There is no difference between having 8GB of RAM with no swap vs 4 GB of RAM + 4GB of max swap. There is always a limit, and once you reach that you will see errors. –  Natan Nov 13 '13 at 8:46
@Natan: I'd take the 8GB of RAM over 4+4 any day, what happens to your performance when you run out of physical during RAM-intensive operations? –  Mark K Cowan Sep 2 at 8:42
@MarkKCowan I guess there is a difference between having 128MB and 8GB of RAM. When memory is getting full, the OS will start reclaiming memory and garbage collectors will do their jobs. In a desktop with 8GB, it is practically guaranteed enough of it will be reclaimed to keep going, because most of it is cache. If you run out of memory, swapping will always be worse than reclaiming memory because the disk is orders of magnitude slower than CPU + RAM. –  Natan Sep 2 at 11:58

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