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: