IT - Increase the Virtual Memory on your computer

It is recommended to let Windows manage your Virtual Memory but if you are experiencing Virtual Memory messages or performance issues, it could be helpful to manage this yourself. Not only do you need to check what size of RAM you use but also make sure that you have enough free space on your driver.

In this article we will explain how you can do that.

Before we go into how you change the size of your Virtual Memory, we will explain What is Virtual Memory and Why is it useful.

What is Virtual Memory and Why is it useful?

Virtual Memory has been used since late 1950's and early 1960's. So it is not a new concept when it comes to IT functions but is easily one of those that people don't know about.

A Virtual Memory is a part of the Operative system which lets you create a secondary memory to your computer. The main memory or also known as RAM is the physical memory in a computer. 

The Virtual memory is optimizing the performance of the memory in a computer by running both as a software and hardware. It is compensating where the physical memory is lacking, which is usually the capacity/amount of memory that could be used by the computer. 

So how is it optimizing the memory, that is by moving memory that hasn't been used for a recently into storage on the computer. In this storage it is ready be brought back to the memory if needed later on. The storage is a hard drive or solid-state drive (aka SSD).

It is quite useful to use this type of memory and as mentioned before it is an important part to optimize the computer so you can multitask or run larger programs which needs more memory.

Of course you shouldn't rely completely on Virtual memory, if you do not have much main memory (RAM) to begin with you can't magically run everything on the computer at once. If you choose to run a computer with small RAM and only going for Virtual memory the computer will be negatively affected. This is because with a small RAM you force the computer to constantly move files between the two memories and will slow down the computer. The Virtual Memory is slower than RAM when it comes to speed to read files.

The Virtual Memory was design back when RAM's were expensive to help people to overcome that type of issue. But luckily today RAM is one of the cheapest parts in a computer so it is better to have a bit more than you think you need, but not too much.

How to setup the Virtual Memory

From the start of using a computer this setup is set to let Windows to manage the Virtual Memory. But usually this is set quite low. If you choose to mange this by yourself you can set it a lot higher. The ratio is between 1,5 - 3 times the memory (RAM) size. recommended is to use the ratio 2. Follow the steps below to manage this by yourself.

1. Go into setting of Windows by clicking Windows key + I
2. Click on System on the left side and scroll down to find About. Click on this option

3. Click on Advanced System settings

4. Under the Performance section click Settings.
5. Go to the advanced tab and for the Virtual Memory section you click Change.
6. Uncheck "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives".

   

7. Select Custom size and enter your desired size with the ratio 1,5-3. We will use the ratio 2. Also worth noting is that you write the size in MB and not GB which RAM's usually display their size. In our case we have 68GB of RAM so 68 000MB and with the ratio 2 we will enter 136 000MB. If you don't know your size of RAM you can see it on Step 3.

   

8. After setting you size click "Set" and then "OK".
9. For this setting to take effect you need to reboot your system.