I know that's the commonly used rule of thumb, but isn't it a bit excessive these days? 4 GB RAM and 6 more GB of a pagefile seems like total overkill to me.

Depends; when Photoshop likes to use around 5GB of RAM by itself you're better off with a safety net.

That being said I keep it on system managed; I can always defragment my drive but I can rarely recover data lost in a system crash.

Yeah, ever since you guys mentioned that I put mine back on system managed as well. I can't say that I'm noticing any difference either way but I do remember that the time I tried to run The Maw demo it gobbled up memory past the 2 gigs I had the page file set at and i went down in a blaze of glory.

Not really, HDDs / SSDs are getting bigger, so its not a thing to even consider. :p

Is there a regular hard drive you could keep the page file on? Since it'll probably be written to a lot (even when you have RAM left to fill), it's better to keep it on a drive that doesn't die as quickly just because you're writing to it. Speed shouldn't be much of an issue, when the page file actually gets used for active data, you've already lost.

Yep, there is, way bigger than I actually need. Does the system really write into the pagefile even if it's not necessary? That seems odd.

I know about the frequent writing issues with SSDs, but I figured the pagefile was just sitting there doing nothing. Thanks for the advice, I'll move it to the other drive, then.

First check what kind of SSD you have. If I read correctly, there are models that don't suffer from the write / read limit (similar to RAM in that regard).

There are models that suffer less from it, but I'm pretty certain there are none that don't suffer from it at all. MLC is the most common, cheapest, and fastest-degrading type, SLC is the better and much more expensive one, although slightly slower I believe.

The first has 2 (or more?) bits per cell while the latter only has 1, making sure each cell is used less, and thus degrade slower.