How to Set Up your Pagefile for DCS World

[NineLine]

I know a number of people have tried this including me, it also may help with some unexplained crashes that seem to be due to memory issues, see the tip here:

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/increase-page-file-size-virtual-memory-windows

As well, here is a video created by CaptPickguard showing how this is done as well!

DigitalEngine said:

There has got to be hundreds of threads on this forum by now entitled something such as;

...performance or fps drop after last update...

or some such. It's as if folks are not event reading the titles of the last 2 to 8 threads down which have been created or posted too, which makes this forum so much less helpful.

So in the same spirit of it all,

 

I'd thought I'd re-post a tip here by Mustang which made a fairly noticeable difference for my system (see specs in signature) in single player and multiplayer, and that's in VR with the HTC Vive to boot. I was surprised!

Anyway here it is below, and the original post can be found here.

Thanks to Mustang :beer:, and hoping this thread helps anyone who is having performance issues [mostly all of us (and I'm referring to DCS World, only )],

and who has the ability to read the thread titles more than the first two down from the top... :huh::smartass:

 

Mustang said:

Do this guys, set your pagefile to custom 16384 - 16384 and you should be able to enter any server and fly for hours.

 

[Goa]

just a question : why has to be exactly 16384 rather thany 16000 or even higher like 24000 or 32000 ?

[rrohde]

1024 * 16 = 16384

[norbot]

Because it's 1024 x 16 (1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes).

Edited January 23, 2019 by norbot
rrohde was faster :)

[Dino Might]

Why not 1024 * 32? For thosnof us that are computer illiterate, is the pagefile size dependent on RAM, disk space, something else?

[wilbur81]

Why not 1024 * 32? For thosnof us that are computer illiterate, is the pagefile size dependent on RAM, disk space, something else?

 

Indeed... I have 32 GB of RAM, not 16. Would I benefit from 1024 x 32?

[BitMaster]

it wont matter if you define 16000 or 16384 or 16555.

 

To comply to computing standards people use the exact manifold of 1024.

 

 

Wilbur81,

 

the only benefit could be less stutter if you have some and better stability if your DCS crashes or hangs upon exiting etc.. There wont be more frames or such.

 

I have tried DCS with all possible PF variations I could think of, HDD, SSD, NVMe, variabel, fixed and also NO pagefile. It ALL worked on my rig, even no PF worked, so with 32GB you do not so much depend on it as systems with less memory I guess. Tho with no pageFile it did not always exit DCS properly iirc. Anyway, I have 32GB RAM and 32GB swap to be safe and my DCS hardly ever crashes or disconnects for unknown reasons.

[wilbur81]

it wont matter if you define 16000 or 16384 or 16555.

 

To comply to computing standards people use the exact manifold of 1024.

 

 

Wilbur81,

 

the only benefit could be less stutter if you have some and better stability if your DCS crashes or hangs upon exiting etc.. There wont be more frames or such.

 

I have tried DCS with all possible PF variations I could think of, HDD, SSD, NVMe, variabel, fixed and also NO pagefile. It ALL worked on my rig, even no PF worked, so with 32GB you do not so much depend on it as systems with less memory I guess. Tho with no pageFile it did not always exit DCS properly iirc. Anyway, I have 32GB RAM and 32GB swap to be safe and my DCS hardly ever crashes or disconnects for unknown reasons.

 

Thanks, Bit! :thumbup: And one more question from me: Is a 32 GB swap the same as a 32 GB Page File?

 

THanks..

[Goa]

Thanks, Bit! :thumbup: And one more question from me: Is a 32 GB swap the same as a 32 GB Page File?

 

THanks..

 

 

yes this is what he meant , swap memory or page file , different name same thing :thumbup:

[Rudel_chw]

just a question : why has to be exactly 16384 rather thany 16000 or even higher like 24000 or 32000 ?

 

 

The size should be a multiple of 4096, which is the page size used by Windows. I've 16 GB of RAM and use a pagefile of 32767 MB ... keep in mind that this is disk space, so you have to have (at least) that amount available on the drive.

 

 

The item that helps performance isnt the value per se, but rather the fact that it is a fixed size, so Windows wont alter the size when you are in the middle of a dogfight :)

[Stonehouse]

Pretty sure it should be set to 1.5 times the memory you have to the nearest 4096. Fixing the size does give a performance boost as Rudel says.

[Worrazen]

I might have found the cause of this ... as far as unexplained crashes go, It seems to be needing more memory than usual, it shouldn't.

 

 

As for performance I haven't figured that out, how it could affect that, unless people have like 16GB of RAM but just making the pagefile bigger how could that help with performance, that may be something else. not sure.

 

 

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=3823673

 

 

yes this is what he meant , swap memory or page file , different name same thing

 

I've read that it's not exactly the same, for example compared to linux swap, but don't hold my word for it.

 

Win10 also has a swapfile.sys for newer Windows apps (under the UWP API) which can be fully hibernated into the swap file so it works a bit different than the pagefile.sys as well.

Edited March 5, 2019 by Worrazen

[Fannon]

I was under the impression you weren't suppose to increase page file on SSD as it writes more often leading to quicker failure. Not that it matters in my case, I get CTD no error and while monitoring my Ram it only ever gets up to a max of 16GB ram and I have 32 so it's not running out either way so standard windows automatic page file should work for me.

Edited October 8, 2019 by Fannon

[Aluminum Donkey]

I was under the impression you weren't suppose to increase page file on SSD as it writes more often leading to quicker failure. Not that it matters in my case, I get CTD no error and while monitoring my Ram it only ever gets up to a max of 16GB ram and I have 32 so it's not running out either way so standard windows automatic page file should work for me.

 

I think it's unlikely you'll ever wear out an SSD in consumer use, such as a gaming rig.

 

I have a 5-year-old 240GB Kingston V300 drive that I bought back in 2015, and I have a 16GB paging file on it.

 

I have installed and removed numerous large games to & from it more times than I can remember as well, and Kingston SSD Manager shows 96% SSD Life Remaining and none of the spare blocks have been used yet.

 

So, I doubt it's a problem. This is an older, "cheap" SSD and it's standing up just fine. If you have an SSD just use it like any other drive, don't worry about it's lifespan. When it fails after 10 years, just buy another. They keep getting cheaper as well as bigger and better :)

 

AD

[ahmad.skywalker]

Hi all.

 

i have problem with high fidelity aircrafts after AV8 i mean f16 jf17 f14 f18. i see a crash message with these aircraft and exits the game. i increased page file and nothing happens. my system is lenovo G5070.

in f14 and f18 frame rate is good but in high turns dcs crashes. in harrier when camera moves and in f16 as aircraft detaches from ground this problem happens. in attached files there is 2 different log files.

dcs.log-20200419-102647.zip

dcs.log-20200429-205414.zip

[NoPro]

Sorry guys, but how to get to that page where I can adjust the page file?

 

Cheers

[TAW_Blaze]

I have 32 GB RAM and experimented with 32 GB pagefile for a while but eventually reverted to 16 GB pagefile only. Interestingly with 16 GB pagefile I have better performance. My only explanation is that maybe this results in a tendency to rather use RAM over pagefile, but this should be the default so I'm rather puzzled at this.

 

However fixed over dynamic pagefile is a huge improvement by itself, mad stutters when it has to allocate more pagefile because it ran out..

[BMGZ06]

I tried giving it 30gb of page file and nothing changed performance or reduction in crashes. Since this last update the crashes are frequent and others I fly with are having the same issues. I think there is still a major memory leak or something else causing the game to want huge amounts of memory.

[G.J.S]

Nima2014 etc,

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/how-to-manage-virtual-memory-pagefile-windows-10,36929.html

 

(Doing this on my phone so sorry if I’ve snarfed it up). This is hopefully a link showing how to manage the page file.

[Eldur]

Pretty sure it should be set to 1.5 times the memory you have to the nearest 4096. Fixing the size does give a performance boost as Rudel says.

 

This literally is a stone age advice. Don't do that. Remember that the pagefile is there to have more memory ready than physically installed. It's a bit like the upper 0.5GB of a GTX 970, but even slower than that

 

Decide a target size. Somewhere around 32-48GB should be sufficient for DCS. Now substract your physical RAM from that, multiply by 1024 and there you've got the value that you'd enter for both min and max. Let's say you want to go for 40GB with 32GB of RAM, set it to 8192.

 

In case you run into problems, feel free to increase the amount. But again, especially when having lots of RAM already, getting something like 1.5x or 2x the amount as a pagefile is bollocks. Imagine having 64GB in there... you'd literally waste another 64GB alone by just taking it 1x, up to 128GB of your drive - for nothing.

[Mr_sukebe]

Well here's an interesting one.

Just been looking at system usage, and was using 32GB of RAM on the Syria map, i.e. quite a reasonable amount.

Yet when I look in task manager, I see DCS using circa 10GB, the rest of the stuff using around 6GB. So what is actually consuming and tieing up the other 16GB of RAM?

 

I can't see anything using that much?

Has the current version of DCS kicked off an un-named app that eats memory?

 

More to the point, is anyone else seeing this?

 

Just tried the same test on the Cauc map. DCS is using just under 8GB of RAM, and there's a total system usage of circa 20GB. So I don't think that this is just restricted to the Syria map, though the complexity of the Syria map is making this even more obvious.

Edited August 30, 2020 by Mr_sukebe

[NineLine]

How much of your Vid Cards memory is being used and are you seeing any shared GPU memory usage?

Edited September 1, 2020 by NineLine

[Mr_sukebe]

Just checked my RAM usage.

 

This was with the game running, Syria map, sat on the ground in an F18. Specs below:

DCS using 14GB of RAM

Total RAM usage, 31.2GB

VRAM usage, 8GB

Shared GPU usage, only a minor amount during mission load. Post jumping into an aircraft, nothing, though clearly Windows has plenty to spare.

Edited September 1, 2020 by Mr_sukebe

[Mr_sukebe]

Any further thoughts on the above?

[Worrazen]

Depends what kind of numbers and where you're looking at, it can mean something else that you think it means. I'll dig into windows memory stuff again once I finish resintalling a newer version of Win10.

 

Windows memory model and the way memory consumption/usage is reported, grouped, labeled is one giant clusterpoop to wrap the head around, particularly because many things aren't even relevant for most people that need only totals. It takes great amount of effort and reading up on devloper documentation to understand it for good.

 

 

The best way to send reports is to make a profile of the stats so we get the whole timeline chart, not just an arbitrary point in time (I think driver utilities are now able to do this, or use MSI Afterburner's logging or overlays)