What happens if virtual memory is too high

Viewed 22k times. Like will it slow down your boot-up? Improve this question. Jacques Jacques 1 1 gold badge 6 6 silver badges 14 14 bronze badges.

What kind of "ViM" are you talking about, "virtual memory"? This tag is for Vim, the text editor. For what it's worth, virtual memory is supposed to be some empty space on your hard drive used to offload your RAM. I suppose most OSes will take what is available, no matter what crazy numbers you have set. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer.

Georg Georg 1. James Conry James Conry 1 1 1 bronze badge. You are correct about that, James. I'd just add that every effort should be made to avoid the use of the pagefile at all. So my VMs are sized appropriately so that everything fits in RAM, since the pagefiles are about 10, times slower if on a hard drive.

If your VMs and other applications can't fit then the slowdown can make you wonder if your computer has failed. But usually you can wait it out if it is important or shut it down and try again with a more appropriate size. Zombian Zombian 2 2 gold badges 7 7 silver badges 18 18 bronze badges. It makes no sense to compare the speed of virtual memory to the speed of RAM. If he wants to know if there are any performance penalties to allocating more VM then he should be aware that it will not behave the same as adding more RAM.

Windows XP users should click the Advanced tab. Vista users should click on the Advanced System Settings link on the left, and then click the Advanced tab. Next, under "Performance" click the Settings button. Finally, click the Advanced tab. You'll now see the "Virtual Memory" section at the bottom of this dialog. You should see a value following "Total paging file size for all drives" - this is the size in MB of your system's virtual memory.

In the ensuing dialog are some options for changing your system's virtual memory. I discuss SSDs below. RAM is faster than storage, and you have much less of it.

You can think of RAM as the immediate workspace, and storage as the file cabinet. Some of the code and data in RAM goes to the swap file, making room to load something else.