XP Page file gets huge, system slows to a crawl

[barwick]

This happened a lot more when I had "fast user switching" enabled, but now it's happening again. If I leave my machine turned on and running for a few days like I normally do, after a while, the page file will get up to like 700 megs (right now after a reboot it's around 300 megs, it used to be smaller though...), and the system will just absolutely crawl, and the hard drive is churning like no other.

Is there a fix for this, besides "just reboot"? It's ridiculously annoying, and sometimes I'm working on a project for a few days at a time, and don't want to shut it down and restart it, re-open all my programs, etc...

[CoffeeFiend]

Sounds like a program you're using has memory leaks or such, hence your memory usage goes through the roof. As it starts paging a lot, of course it'll come down to a crawl.

You shouldn't have to reboot.

[barwick]

so find a memory leak finder & run it?

[Takeshi]

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...;hl=memory+leak

[barwick]

wtf... it's my friggin' Linksys network manager, it goes up by 8k every few seconds...

[LLXX]

That is definitely a leak... if by 'network manager' you mean the utility that sets the configuration of the wireless adapter, you don't need it. Windows XP has its own wireless configuration utility, which works perfectly fine.

Fix the pagefile's size (I prefer 1024/1024) after a defrag and you will notice better performance as it fills up, since it doesn't have to resize and possibly fragment.