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The size of pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys

Anonymous
2020-07-04T18:27:57+00:00

Hello,

I run my C: drive on a relatively small (110 GB) SSD so space is limited on this drive. A few months ago I upgraded my RAM from 8 to 16 GB. Ever since then, I saw that the space on my C: drive was slowly shrinking. Curious about what was taking all the space, I installed a third party file indexing app and saw that 2 files were taking more space up than any other file that I had known. These files are: pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. Their sizes were (as of writing this) 13.6 GB and 6.6 GB respectively. These two are taking so much storage and my computer tends to slow down a lot when my SSD's free space goes under 20 GB or so. These files are quickly getting larger and I am afraid that they are going to fill up my C: drive. I know the files are for storing excess memory but is there any way that I can limit their size?

Thanks.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-07-04T18:33:03+00:00

    Hi, my name is Nigel and I am an Independent Advisor for Microsoft here to try and work with you on this issue you are having.

    Pagefile.sys wants to be on your SSD and should be let as system managed.

    The size of the Pagefile.sys varies from a minimum of 1.5 times to a maximum of 4 times of the physical memory (RAM) of your computer. Pagefile is automatically managed by Windows 10 by default.

    hiberfil.sys file is used by Windows to store the current state of your computer (the contents of memory, open applications and documents, etc.) during a hibernation.

    You could simply turn off hibernation and this file would be very small.

    The following article describes how to do this.

    https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/2859-enable...

    Other than that, run clean-up (including system files) regularly.

    You may also want to add a 2nd HDD, and store you profile folders (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures) on the second drive.

    Any non game applications where performance doesn't always require SSD could also be installed to the second drive.

    Hope this helps!

    Feel free to ask back any questions and let me know how it goes.

    If you don't have any more questions, feel free to choose a rating and let us know whether this information was helpful to you!"

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-07-04T18:34:45+00:00

    Additionally, If you do not have the space for your page file to grow, this would impact system performance.

    You could set a 16GB static page file on C:\ and then add a second HDD (non SSD) , and then set Windows managed page file to D:\ which can grow as required.

    Thanks.

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