No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
This is the correct answer and the function is called Virtual Memory in Windows but is commonly known as the pagefile or swap. Adding more RAM won't save you from this, as Windows will automatically move memory files into virtual memory if they're idle for awhile, regardless of how much RAM is currently in use. In fact adding more RAM will probably increase the size of the virtual memory which may make the problem worse for you.
Here is a more complete explanation: Swap file in Windows 10 & Windows 11: How to use it to optimize PC performance (increase, adjust, deactivate swap)?
The pagefile is configurable. You can change which hard drive it gets stored on, how big it can be, and even turn it off completely. Turning it off has risks though, and may lead to system crashes (see the warnings in the article).
You could add an SSD specifically to serve as a pagefile location and nothing else, in which case you could just get a small cheap one (a 32GB SSD would be more than enough for 16GB of RAM) - assuming that you have a place to plug it in to your motherboard, and then turn off the pagefile storage on all other drives in your system. That would be an easy change as you wouldn't have to reinstall Windows onto a new hard drive.
Ultimately though, the easiest and cheapest fix is to just change your behavior - close the game if you're not using it for awhile and relaunch it when you want to play again.
virtual memory is related, but that's a broader system that also gets used when no swap file was set up.
I agree that adding more RAM won't necessarily make the problem go away as windows might still swap the game out if it deems it more important to cache more files in RAM, but I don't see why that would make it worse.
The swap file or pagefile is automatically set up in Windows 10/11. You have to do something manually to prevent it.
By making the swap file larger, which may be an issue if the hard drive doesn't have enough space left, and if not it will still increase the amount of time needed to recover data from the swap, because it's larger.
yes. but it still is different from virtual memory. that's a broader thing.
then open the control panel and fix the swap setup. and then enjoy your more ram. the solution to this problem does not seem to be not upgrading to have more ram.
Of course, that's why I said...
because that's how it's labeled in the Windows Settings menu.
Adding more RAM is not a solution to OP's described problem in any way. In the context of moving data from active memory to the pagefile, Windows doesn't care how much RAM you have, only how long the data in active memory has been idle (which is not configurable). Adding more RAM to the system will do nothing to change that behavior.
However, adding more RAM might make retrieving data from the pagefile slower. Yes you could adjust the pagefile settings to address this, as you said, but it still doesn't do anything to address OP's problem.
then I misunderstood you. I thought you meant swap = virtual memory