Finally.....Solved CTD issues... for those of us with < 32 GB ram

And what is your PROOF? Without knowing this thread I did the following:
Create a fixed sized 16 GByte pagefile.sys on my second SSD drive D:, that is in my case MSFS 2020 on C: .
Please bother other people.

Well, with “real” hard disks it makes sense to have the game on one hard disk and the page file on another hard disk. This speeds up “head positioning time”, see Positioning-time Definition & Meaning | YourDictionary

If you have two SSDs like me, you can do the same. A SSD has no moving parts, but bandwidth is limited between SSD and memory. The positive effect can be very little, maybe you can’t measure much.

Which means what?

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Question: What is the positive effect of having the pagefile.sys on a different SSD.
Answer: Use the game start time as a measurement.
Hypothesis: With pagefile.sys on a different SSD the game start time is shorter.

There IS a correlation between pagefile.sys and crash to desktop or even MS-Windows blue screen

I have MSFS 2020 game at drive C:, a SSD
I have 16 GByte fixed size pagefile.sys at drive D:, another SSD
I have 16 GByte RAM

  1. Test: Graphics mode Ultra, airplane B748. departure London Heathrow. I got a CTD after selecting the airplane, airport and before I was in the “game screen”. I used ressource monitor to watch the pagefile.sys. This was the only pagefile.sys activity and it was just before the CTD.
    Note: I took me some time to make the screenshot - I did not expect this. But in real live it was pagefile.sys activity and then CTD.

  1. Test like before but this time I was video recording the ressource monitor window. I got a MS-Windows blue screen (total system crash). The video file is corrupted, therefore no playback possible. But again pagefile.sys activity and then blue screen.

but not because ot the pagefile setting… blue screen is a completly other story as CTD.
I assume there is another reason for that, and this is may be your overcloacking (e.g.).

As the pagefile.sys has become quite an issue in some senses, I thought I would share how I do my systems pagefile and rollingcache.ccc

There are three files we need to be aware of:

pagefile.sys
rollingcache.ccc
manual cache files

There are a couple of things we need to take into account:
Size of pagefile needed
Which drives these are all stored on

The system is going to be writing to the pagefile all the time your computer is switched on. That is by far the most heavily used one.
For that reason, it might be better off being placed on a mechanical drive (HDD), rather than an SSD. I do not recommend that unless you need to due to another issue such as limited numbers of disks.
Similarly, it needs to be fairly fast access to be efficient copying to and from RAM - so a 7200RPM disk is much better than a 5400 one.
If you have it set to managed size, when your flight gets to a very dense city, the pagefile will increase in size, I have seen mine at 32GB plenty of times. The biggest I have seen it get to was 38GB
I find it is best to leave just one drive with a pagefile, the rest I turn off.
(If your drive were to fail, the system will just make a temporary one on a drive that has not failed, so you do not need to worry about that)

The calculations for the size of the pagefile.sys is one of the most heavily over-discussed things in my opinion. The formulae go on and on and vary quite a bit, so here I can only give my opinion.
I have never seen mine ask for more than 38GB in my current system. I have 16GB RAM
The most usual I have seen it at (displayed on my G19 screen live) when using MSFS2020 is 32GB. I have a monitoring prog on my system that shows me the usage of my drives to my little screen on my G19 keyboard. I use that to decide where things go. While I have been writing this, my T: drive has been in use constantly, flicking on every twenty seconds or so, and when flying, I can see the reeads and writes to my three drives as I sit at an airport/fly/land etc.

I have experimented with various combinations of size and disk locations, for all the parameters of these storage files and devices.
I recommend this for your pagefile setting:
1/4 your RAM size as minimum
3.5x your RAM size as maximum
pagefile.sys on an SSD
Turn the rest off.
I have been using my C: as my pagefile for over two years, since I built this PC.
In all that time, my C: drive SSD life now says 92%. My PC is on 18-20 hours avg. a day probably.

The second highest use will be your rollingcache.ccc, unless your manual cache covers the whole area you fly.
This will be used as you fly around the virtual world, caching the details of scenery and objects from the downloaded data, and keeping it in to hand until you fly so many places that it wipes over itself.
SImilarly, you may need to adjust the size to keep or lose more data, depending on your flight patterns.

Lastly, the manual cache. This is only made bigger by hand, so the only concern is reading speed and access.

So, we have to balance the pagefile.sys and rollingcache.ccc and drive usage.

Put them on different drives
The pagefile.sys should be the one demoted to HDD - If anything is demoted to HDD, the pagefile.sys gets the most usage, and is always used when the PC is on.
The rollingcache.ccc is more read from than written to once you fly a lot
Partitions are not drives, so if you have two physical drives, C with one partition, and one is an HDD that has two logical drives D & E on it, putting one file on D and one on E will not help - in this case, if you have two physical drives, put one of them on the other physical drive
If you have three physical drives or more (C, D & E) with D as your MSFS 2020 drive, put the files on the drives that do NOT have your MSFS 2020 on it (C & E).
The rollingcache.ccc can be turned off - try it without it. If you have a good internet speed, then you might find you don’t need it.

My rollingcache.ccc is set to 20GB, and I don’t have a manual cache.

All in all, it works far better than having my pagefile.sys on my HDD when flying, as that takes away about 30% faps, dropping me from 24-28 to 16-18 and makes it all as stuttery as hell. I have tried setting my pagefile at 32GB, turning it off completely apart from 2GB on my C:, I have tried turning off the rollingcache, turning on the manual cache, just about every combination of them all.

I have my set up like this:
C: SSD WIndows and pagefile.sys
D: SSD MSFS 2020
G: SSD Steam games and MSFS2020’s rollingcache.ccc
T: HDD User files documents folder etc. (also used for recording video from Radeon ReLive)

This means that when I am flying MSFS 2020, the rolling cache, game files and pagefile are all read from separate disks, and if I start recording, that too is on a separate disk.
It is unlikely that I will play a steam game and MSFS2020 at the same time, and the same when I use a steam game, that will use the pagefile in my C:

I agree with this idea, if both drives are equally fast. I have an old and slow SSD (drive C:) and a new and fast SSD (drive D:). Therefore I put pagefile, rollingcache and MSFS 2020 on the fast SSD.

About the sizes: I follow the simple idea of “same size as RAM”. I have 16 GByte RAM. This is the size of pagefile and rollingcache. By the way, the RAM load was maximum 13 GByte in graphics mode Ultra and of this 13 GByte, 2 GByte are needed for the operating system. MSFS 2020 does not need more then 16 GByte RAM.

To keep things simple I have no manual cache.

Last but not least: Setting “AI offline” is the biggest FPS eater in my setup. Sometimes this setting makes no FPS degradation, sometimes it is a pain. See this video: https://youtu.be/aCmio01VKEk

This is a 3 minute vid on correctly setting up page file size to match your ram…wow, did it work. Hope it helps!

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What the heck is RAM load?

Ram load…:roll_eyes:

Ressource monitor, memory, used memory. The green part of the bar. See:

It is okay.

Took 2+ minutes to get there.

Easier to:

Right click “Start”
Click “System”
Click “Advanced System Settings”
Click “Settings” under Performance
Click “Advanced”
Click “Change” under Virtual Memory

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Awesome…thanks for the input :+1: :100:

Another TIP is to

(1) Set your Virtual memory to a FIXED size.
You DO NOT want the OS changing its size, and causing fragmentation (even if it is a Solid State Drive)

(2) You might even try setting the registry, to erase the content of the VM, when the system shuts down. (can’t hurt, and might make a significant difference for those still using a mechanical drive)

EDIT REGISTRY with extreme caution & know what you are doing – otherwise, leave it alone !!

Another tip.

Why not let Windows manage it for all of your drives? I do that.

Hmmmm … why not indeed – if we were talking about the same thing …
Whatever you are doing, I hope its working for you … :sunglasses:

“Whatever you are doing”?

Replying to your post. Don’t you know what you were doing?

I don’t have clue !

That’s why I am here, looking for technical help to manage my drives …
:see_no_evil: :hear_no_evil: :speak_no_evil:

I would like to add my own two cents: increasing page file, along with clearing space on my C: drive (I only had 5GB free) completely stopped all CTDs for me a while back!