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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

Windows seems to work a lot better with a 16MB page file for whatever reason, just because it refuses to enable memory compression without it. Fucking stupid

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It might be shocking but so does Linux (though 16MB won’t cut it) and all other OSes

My curiosity is piqued. What reason did you have to disable the page file?

128GB of system memory?

That might remove a reason to not do it

Am I missing some sort of common-sense explanation of why page files are so great? I have enough system memory that I shouldn't need to spill it to disk.

You have a lot of unused anonymous memory that is better swapped out and used as a file cache. Specifically for Linux swap, see https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

I don't understand how swap helps when you already have enough memory though. The article seems to say it's important to be able to swap out anonymous pages, but why? Especially when you aren't under memory contention? Just because memory isn't needed yet doesn't mean it's a benefit to get rid of it. It takes time to swap it to disk and then time to get it back. Why is that so important? Why would the kernel turn off things like compression otherwise? Makes no sense to me. No swap = punish the user by being less efficient on purpose? That's no argument for swap at all.

No, that's not the common sense you are missing ;-)

Your system your rules. But you twiddled a knob to appease your tweak imp, you didn't like the new behaviour, so you called it "fucking stupid". My experience is that the windows vmm is a very high quality component, so simple heuristics tells me PEBCAK.

I can think of two different possible reasons why memory compression might require a page file. Until you understand the technical reasoning, you don't know whether the design is stupid or clever. So taking a strong position is _eliding over a core tenet of wisdom_

> But you twiddled a knob to appease your tweak imp

I ran out of disk space because Windows decided my page file should suddenly be 64gb. With no space left to save my work, I found out there's no way to shrink the page file without rebooting. Of course the next thing I did was try to cast it off.

Maybe it was my skill issue for not expecting a sudden 64gb file there... or my skill issue for not choosing a nonzero size after?

That's a good reason, I might do the same. I certainly used to twiddle that setting trying to make space for Sim City 2000 on an 80MB disk.

I see a major footgun in memory compression that Linux doesn't care about - it'll just oomkill your shit, hence TFA. But footguns are not acceptable in mass-market software. Apple also removes them.

It's easy to look at the half-baked ui libraries and fucking Teams and fucking SharePoint and conclude that Microsoft engineers are stupid. But, for your interest: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design

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