Two unrelated things. Page file compression in RAM is unrelated to disk compression. 10 does compress the entire OS on low disk space devices (I think you can also force it on other devices), and does a pretty good job of that in my experience. It saved me a few GB compared to 8.1 on a tablet with 32GB of disk space.

If you have 8-16GB of RAM and don't use any pagefile demanding application like photoshop, then you can disable it entirely. I did so for the last 3 years and I still don't have any problems.

Good Luck!

I haven't used a pagefile in ages. I have enough ram.

Transparent disk compression has been around since there was enough extra ram to take advantage of it; Although the earliest ones I can think of are and [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics]Stacker. Both of these are effectively TSR drivers, and the drivers along with the booting files MUST remain uncompressed.

However with file compression built into the filesystem and using a simple decompression method you only need the initial boot block (on NTFS is probably hidden system file anyways) which will then decompress everything else on the fly rather than needing a lot more.

Heh, the stories of someone compression their entire C drive and compressing their booting files too, and the system wouldn't boot because the system couldn't decode the compressed files... What fun. Ahhh..

Where did you get that idea? You're supposed to have a considerable chunk of RAM free most of the time. The amount of RAM you buy is based upon peak use, not average use.

Swap isn't supposed to be used as a substitute for having enough RAM, it's supposed to be there so that you can page out programs that aren't being used at the moment, so you have plenty of RAM for what you're working on.

As far as big goes, you're swap should always be at least as large as the amount of RAM you have installed in your computer. Most of it is going to be unused at any given moment, but that ensures that you've got ample space in case you need it. Modern disks are huge and a 1TB disk is easily within the reach of anybody that wants it.

Sorry for late reply, I've been away for a bit now.

I have a HDD, not an SSD, so constant overwriting shouldn't be a problem for me. However I am quite low on disk space so I'd like to get it back. It's great to hear that it shrinks on its own, I'll see if it's better after the next reboot and if not, I'll try the swap trick I found which is to move the pagefile sys on a different partion, reboot and then move it back again and reboot, which should reset it to its original values. And then perhaps apply the max size to it.

Thanks for the extra speed boost with the SD card or a flash drive, that sounds great! And thank you everyone for all your tips!

Also I have 4GB RAM and Windows 7 64-bit.

I'd have to second your recommendation, although fragmentation is only an issue on hard disks and not on SSDs. It's not an issue on SSDs, but it very much is and always will be an issue on hard disks, where it takes time for the drive heads to hop around from cylinder to cylinder then wait for the disk to spin around to the right sector(s) to read/write data. Fragmentation isn't a big issue when writing new files to disks with lots of free space, but it is an issue when increasing the size of existing files on the disk where they can not be stored contiguously - which is the definition of fragmentation and the cause of performance loss. It's also a problem on disks that are kept almost always full such as a disk that never has more than 5-10% free space left. Having the OS constantly resizing the pagefile scattered all over the disk surface is significantly slower than allocating a static pagefile on a new disk or disk that has tonnes of free space contiguous and leaving it alone. Modern OSs try to reduce fragmentation by writing new files into unfragmented space, but if a disk is full the chances of its free space being unfragmented are slim unless one defrags it first, and people rarely ever bother defragmenting nowadays.

Most people that have SSD drives end up having swap on the SSD by default though unless they move it, so it wouldn't matter to them though.

But if you're using a modern O/S, your average use *should* be near peak, because your O/S should precache. Windows sure does in 7 and 8; I haven't played with 10 yet and don't know.

Besides, if you're enough of a nerd to really worry about paging, you're enough of a nerd to page into a RAM drive XD

Can you clarify what you're saying? I find it baffling since you seem to agree with me yet claim not to.

You say that optimally a system needs more RAM than peak use, and that is what I said. A large page file (for a dynamically allocated page file, which is the Windows default) indicates high peak use, which means that more RAM is needed, or RAM usage should be reduced (for example by moving to a less memory hungry browser, seeing if there are programs open that don't need to be, etc.).

As I also said, upgrading RAM past peak use isn't always practical, and so using Readyboost or the Windows 10 method can alleviate to an extent the performance problems that result from using more RAM than is available.

Regarding a fixed sized page file, if you're regularly using a lot more RAM than you have in your system, then a fixed size page file might provide a little more performance thanks to less fragmentation, but Readyboost or Windows 10's RAM compression (or both) would provide much more performance, so I'd suggest using one of these and leaving the page file management to Windows. (BTW, an SSD is also a good alternative.)
If you have 4GB of RAM and had a 10.8GB page file, it means that at some point you reached 14.8GB of RAM usage. This is quite a lot.

And as I said, if you upgrade to Windows 10 it should manage RAM better. you should also be able to save some disk space by telling it to compress itself. So you'd probably see some benefit if you can make that upgrade.

Still, the best solution for a RAM starved system with a full HD is more RAM and a larger HD. The other stuff is bandaid.

As someone suggested, you can set the page file to have a fixed size, so you wont have to worry about increasing size.
Personally I find that my pc works the same with either 2 GB or 8 GB page file. (But I also use GameBooster)

A friend of mine suggested this: If you have a second HDD, you can move there the page file to increase performance.

Does "disk usage" here mean wasting free disk space for nothing, or the system writing and reading more to the page file, than if it was doing if it was dynamically sized?

I'm still trying to figure out a way to get rid of that annoying 2 second audio-looping pauses that happen in Team Fortress 2 (especially annoying as it tends to happen when I am fighting someone, easy prey), and I think I occasionally see them in some other games too, like Wing Commander Prophecy and Freespace (when there is wingman audio).

I have tried some other suggested fixes for those, but I was meant to try if using a fixed page file size could affect that too.

The first. The OP has a problem of a disk too full. A fixed size page file will make that situation permanently worse, instead of just occasionally when there's high RAM usage.

In terms of performance, a fixed size page file can be better (if it's allocated when the system isn't fragmented), but as I said before, Readyboost and Windows 10 RAM compression will do a lot more for paging performance than making the page file fixed in size.

A competently written OS should never be filling the RAM to that extent. It's a waste of RAM that could be used the next time you open a RAM intensive program. And there's a lot of them out there now that are poorly optimized and guzzle RAM just because.

We have more RAM now than we used to, but that's not a reason to bloat it up with things that we might want to use later.
My point was that paging is a bit more complicated than that. You often times get a lot of paging when you have programs that have been running for a while, but haven't been closed. You might still have more than enough RAM to run all of them at once without issue, but they've been paged out pro-actively in case you need that for something you're doing right now.

All OSes do that to one extent or another as part of memory management.

I do agree though that looking at what you're doing with the RAM and how much you have is an important step here.
Precisely, and as the OP later stated he's only got 4gb of RAM and the disk with the pagefile is a regular HDD that's nearly full.

Facepalm. Turning off pagefile in 2016. Yey!
It shouldn't make a difference in that case either, unless you're writing 100 GB per day every day for 10 years.