Swap memory

Bug Reporting Hub Install, Performance & Graphics
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I am running with 16 GiB RAM.I had numerous black screens lasting perhaps 10 seconds and also program crashes. Felt that perhaps I sometimes was out of RAM but did not see it in my performance monitoring program. I have an SSD. Through the windows program, I increased my swap memory considerably and I have not had any issues since. Do not know if my swap fixed it or if I was just lucky.

Detail steps to reproduce the issue encountered:

PC specs for those who want to assist (if not entered in your profile)

Did you submit this to Zendesk? If so, what is your ticket #?

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I’ll assume you mean paging file seeing I don’t know of any “swap” memory in Windows or MSFS. And no, they aren’t the same thing.

Yes, limiting the paging file is a great way to increase instability of the whole system and introduce random seeming issues. I learned that from my and many other people experience in the FSX days.

I lot of people think it is only for if you run out of RAM. It is not and never has been anywhere near that simple.

Personally I’d trust the advice of the engineers that wrote the system over any gaming mag or parroted advice.

It is even worse when people with SSDs limit it. The whole purpose of the “hack” was to make a contiguous part of a HDD available so the disk head didn’t have to move so much when using the paging file. That is a non-issue with an SSD, they don’t have disk heads!

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Thank you. I will look into the subject of the pagefile which I have not done before. Well, I guess I could have used the name virtual memory instead of swap. However, some people, most likely not systems engineers have used the word swap. Seems someone else who increased the virtual memory had some success.

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Thank you for note. Seems you and I tried to work on the same problem and you had success. So did I.

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Yes it’s definitely called swap memory and alot of people call it that. The guy above just wanted to be cool and feel better than you. There’s a lot of that on here.

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Have 64GB RAM, runs Windows 10 fine with 0 swapfile, VR, boot, windows and MSFS on 1TB M2 drive.
Did a test MSFS Store version

Swap 1024MB - black screen (10 seconds? longer?), MSFS does come back to life.
18GB swap file, no black screens.

  • I used to run with 64GB swapfile, but that seems overkill
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Thanks for your kind words. I am not a systems engineer but is an engineer. Hard to keep up with all the developments in the computer field. I am now 85. Used to write programs in A, B, C, and Pascall. Good old days when stuff was simple but also brand new.

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maybe he mean the different usage of a Unix vs Windows OS.

The word “Swap” is more used in a UNIX Environments ( e.g. own partition type ). In Windows it’s more usually to say “page file” or “virtual memory”. But basicly it is same thing and don’t worry about…

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This is interesting. I had similar problems but not because of running out of RAM (the SSD always offered +16GB virtual memory during the year my PC had 16GB of RAM) but because running out of SSD space.

Some time ago I accidentally run out of free operating system SSD space because of video-capturing games and making endless screenshots in PNG format until the SSD was almost full to the brim but I haven´t noticed that for some time.
This lead to severe scenery caching problems, the Flight Sim having a completely untexturized white-greyish landscape with no houses and vegetation anymore. Empty scenery tiles. No more scenery rendering possible even with 300GB free on the NVMe drive it is installed.

So always keep at least ~60GB free on the primary operating system SSD, and add +16GB extra virtual memory banks to the SSD too :wink: your flight sim needs that to work flawless.

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Thank you for your reply. Yes, when you consider the many, many things that can affect the operation of a high-end computer and the memory hungry MSFS, no wonder many people struggle. We can not all be systems engineers and you sometimes try out stuff where you really do not know what you are doing. Fortunately, after trying and trying you sometimes get lucky. My system works well now, managed to download the new CRJ and I am happy. I struggled with the download all because of my ignorance. I did not notice, that I had a limit on my bandwidth setting. Changed it to unlimited and I download at about 160 Mb/sec.

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yeah… this is for me the most often reason why “system managed” setting of the virtual memory ( pagefile ) not works as expected. There are ‘rules’ for system managed settings about how much Finally.....Solved CTD issues... for those of us with < 32 GB ram - #41 by MichaMMA )

for information: pagefile vs swap memory

in another post I wrote about and remember me also at this thread.
Beside of a semantic meaning unix-windows, there is a possible other reason why it was said that this are different things:

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You enter the figures in Mb in the Paging file options.
I theory the Paging File advice is minimum 1.5 x total RAM so 96000 Mb in your case maximum x 3 so yours would be 192,000 Mb maximum settings box.
That does seem overkill as you said . Have you tried that ?

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often said: this is only a rule for system managed… For manual setting you can set what you need.

The users you answered own 64GIG RAM and he only need a minimal pagefile. I use in this case min:1GIG max:4GIG setting. A pagefile of “0” is never recommended.

And yes… 64GIG pagefile may be to much, but if users set e.g. min:4 max:64 windows itself will never allocate these amount of pagefile.