Sadly, trying to investigate this is quite hard, since people are outright hostile to questions about it.
If you ASK about swapping on windows, you get people telling you that "Microsoft engineers are smart, don't disable swap and go <insert expletive here>" even if you asked something that is NOT about disabling swap.
So, I had this gamer laptop, i7, nVidia GPU, 8GB of RAM (when most machines had 2 or 4), but some stupidly slow 5k RPM HDD made for power saving and locked "noiseless mode", thus very slow seek too (ie: it moves the heads slowly to avoid making noise and for aerodynamic reasons).
I noticed that ever after I just booted up, RAM usage would jump to 6gb and the HDD would trash endlessy and make the machine unusable... after some research I found some interesting posts by MS employees about it:
Windows can "preemptively" use swap, it will write on swap things it thinks you might need to swap out. Sounds good on paper.
Also, Windows has several caching systems, that will write to "RAM" random crap.
One day that was particularly bad, I noticed that when I booted, Windows would immediately attempt to copy to RAM a gigantic binary file that was the sound files of a game I played a lot recently, this caused trashing due to reading the file, then, it would attempt to load other programs it had to, then page out immediately, and enter some crazy loop of trashing the I/O forever... Every time I opened the task manager and looked at the graphs, disk I/O would be constantly maxed out at 100%...
Disabling the VM made the laptop behave better (despite all the bugs Windows have when you disable VM).
But what I really wanted, was to change how the VM works... I wanted to keep the VM, and the caching, but change settings, for example I would set it to NOT page out anything at all unless RAM was used more than 80%, and also to never "cache" stuff unless HDD was actually idle and a good amount of RAM free. But sadly, this can't be done it seems, I got no useful answer on stackexchange sites when I asked this (But got a couple personal messages and e-mails full of expletives in many places where I asked about it, for some reason people get personally offended when the subject is virtual memory).
Java on Windows used to have a background service which touched the pages of the Java components to keep them in memory and make Java performance look better. This was active even if you hadn't run a Java program in weeks. OpenOffice once had a similar program. Enough things like that and you can't get anything done.
Yeah, what you wanted to change is what Linux calls "swappiness", configurable in vm.swappiness. In Windows I can't find any such configuration option.
>One day that was particularly bad, I noticed that when I booted, Windows would immediately attempt to copy to RAM a gigantic binary file that was the sound files of a game I played a lot recently, this caused trashing due to reading the file, then, it would attempt to load other programs it had to
Oh, that's just superfetch, it's a service you can disable to reduce a bit the idle trashing after desktop has loaded.
If you ASK about swapping on windows, you get people telling you that "Microsoft engineers are smart, don't disable swap and go <insert expletive here>" even if you asked something that is NOT about disabling swap.
So, I had this gamer laptop, i7, nVidia GPU, 8GB of RAM (when most machines had 2 or 4), but some stupidly slow 5k RPM HDD made for power saving and locked "noiseless mode", thus very slow seek too (ie: it moves the heads slowly to avoid making noise and for aerodynamic reasons).
I noticed that ever after I just booted up, RAM usage would jump to 6gb and the HDD would trash endlessy and make the machine unusable... after some research I found some interesting posts by MS employees about it:
Windows can "preemptively" use swap, it will write on swap things it thinks you might need to swap out. Sounds good on paper.
Also, Windows has several caching systems, that will write to "RAM" random crap.
One day that was particularly bad, I noticed that when I booted, Windows would immediately attempt to copy to RAM a gigantic binary file that was the sound files of a game I played a lot recently, this caused trashing due to reading the file, then, it would attempt to load other programs it had to, then page out immediately, and enter some crazy loop of trashing the I/O forever... Every time I opened the task manager and looked at the graphs, disk I/O would be constantly maxed out at 100%...
Disabling the VM made the laptop behave better (despite all the bugs Windows have when you disable VM).
But what I really wanted, was to change how the VM works... I wanted to keep the VM, and the caching, but change settings, for example I would set it to NOT page out anything at all unless RAM was used more than 80%, and also to never "cache" stuff unless HDD was actually idle and a good amount of RAM free. But sadly, this can't be done it seems, I got no useful answer on stackexchange sites when I asked this (But got a couple personal messages and e-mails full of expletives in many places where I asked about it, for some reason people get personally offended when the subject is virtual memory).