Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full

ilp0000

Hi,

I searched for a post dealing with this issue, but it had no answers tacked - this will be a tough, complicate issue. May this post interest someone.

I am using a laptop with 16G Ram and 140G SSD, and I am heavily dependent on Vivladi - with 2 windows using around 200 tabs in total.

What happens is that from a certain moment - maybe related with memory usage - pagefile.sys increases to fill the rest of hard disk. Pagefile.sys is a space for virtual memory so it means ram usage must be full.

I checked with other apps, which may cause the issues but finally it must be triggered by the Vivaldi. I understand this is a highly complicate issue related with Windows. But I am wondering if there a way or workaround to stop the issue in Vivalidi's side.

Thanks in advance.

iAN CooG

@ilp0000 said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

2 windows using around 200 tabs in total.

Well, there's no real wonder you're exausting all your RAM. You're abusing of a feature that allocates dozens of Mb per tab. Try using bookmarks, saved sessions with few actually useful tabs per session, instead of leaving open tabs as if they were bookmarks. Nobody need 200 tabs open at the same time

LonM

Check in your windows settings what the max size for the page for is. a couple of GB is enough.

BoneTone

@iAN-CooG said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

Well, there's no real wonder you're exausting all your RAM. You're abusing of a feature that allocates dozens of Mb per tab. Try using bookmarks, saved sessions with few actually useful tabs per session, instead of leaving open tabs as if they were bookmarks. Nobody need 200 tabs open at the same time

I'm going to disagree with you there. I regularly have several hundred tabs open at the same time. Fortunately I'm not experiencing what the OP is; I see virtually no performance degradation by having hundreds of tabs open.

When I do see a performance issue, it's typically due to some website desperately trying to track me. When the page cannot reach the URL for tracking because my blocker prevents it, it tries another one with a different sequence if identifiers in the URL. That fails and the cycle repeats, with little to no time delay such that my blocker will report hundreds of thousands of network requests blocked in the span a just a few minutes. This severely degrades the responsiveness of Vivaldi regardless of how many tabs are open and not hibernated. Once that tab is killed Vivaldi returns to normal, and I blacklist that site never to return to it again.

There are several things the OP & others can do to limit the resource consumption, though even with several hundred tabs open & not hibernated Vivaldi isn't using 16 GB of memory. Hibernating a stack that's not currently in active use can help. There's an auto-hibernate extension written by one of the members of this forum which cam make it easier to manage hibernating tabs, it's got a timer you can configure, or you can click a button to hibernate all but the currently active tab. That said, I rarely hibernate tabs; typically I'll do it when I've got some resource heavy task I need to do in something other than Vivaldi.

The Advanced Web Panels mod is also really useful for a workflow that involves lots of tabs like this. That's better than bookmarks. I use bookmarks for more permanent pages to save. The Advanced Web Panels mod includes a default web panel for managing sessions and that has made sessions a feature I actually use. It can be useful when you want to close out a group of dozens to hundreds of tabs, and also want to reopen them in the future. Sessions can get cluttered with a bunch of unprocessed or partially processed tab groups and my bookmarks collection remains clean and organized.

@ilp0000 said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

What happens is that from a certain moment - maybe related with memory usage - pagefile.sys increases to fill the rest of hard disk. Pagefile.sys is a space for virtual memory so it means ram usage must be full.

I checked with other apps, which may cause the issues but finally it must be triggered by the Vivaldi. I understand this is a highly complicate issue related with Windows. But I am wondering if there a way or workaround to stop the issue in Vivalidi's side.

The pagefile will be used without the physical RAM being maxed out. Your system paging to disk does not mean ram is full. It seems you've got some kind of leak occurring.

How did you determine that Vivaldi is causing this issue? Assuming for the moment that it is a Vivaldi process, what extensions do you have installed? What pages are loaded when it happens? You can easily create a list of all open tabs using the Window Panel. Expand all folders, then select all the tabs, right-click and choose Copy Address. Then you can paste that into anywhere that accepts text.

Have you tested in a brand new/clean profile yet? What testing have you done to try to narrow down the cause? Have you used both task managers to see which Vivaldi process and/or tab is consuming large amounts of memory? (Both being the Windows task manager and the Vivaldi task manager.)

ilp0000

Thanks for your long, kind explanation to help.

@bonetone said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

When I do see a performance issue, it's typically due to some website desperately trying to track me. When the page cannot reach the URL for tracking because my blocker prevents it, it tries another one with a different sequence if identifiers in the URL. That fails and the cycle repeats, with little to no time delay such that my blocker will report hundreds of thousands of network requests blocked in the span a just a few minutes. This severely degrades the responsiveness of Vivaldi regardless of how many tabs are open and not hibernated. Once that tab is killed Vivaldi returns to normal, and I blacklist that site never to return to it again.

Yes, I've exactly experienced that before, which made my RAM full. But that's not the cause with this.

@bonetone said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

The pagefile will be used without the physical RAM being maxed out. Your system paging to disk does not mean ram is full. It seems you've got some kind of leak occurring.

Yes, I understand this.

@bonetone said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

How did you determine that Vivaldi is causing this issue? Assuming for the moment that it is a Vivaldi process, what extensions do you have installed? What pages are loaded when it happens? You can easily create a list of all open tabs using the Window Panel. Expand all folders, then select all the tabs, right-click and choose Copy Address. Then you can paste that into anywhere that accepts text.

@bonetone said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

Have you tested in a brand new/clean profile yet? What testing have you done to try to narrow down the cause? Have you used both task managers to see which Vivaldi process and/or tab is consuming large amounts of memory? (Both being the Windows task manager and the Vivaldi task manager.)

This disk full phenomena occurred from a few months ago and I reinstalled Windows, but it happened again, the space is occupied by pagefile.sys and I have been tracking. And it happened again without other apps not being used and Vivaldi running on over some number of tabs ( not 100% guaranteed that Vivaldi is the cause, though. But the most appealing one.) Actually I got to know that Windows is increasing the file when systems are idle so I cannot pinpoint a specific tab or a page. Using apps added in Web Panel has been a trouble since long ago, so I don't use them. Last doubt could be the extension or profile but what I am using is ad-blocker, dictionay app, grammary, which wouldn't impact much, but after reinstall Windows, I just copied and pasted the default folder. After disk is full, when I check the task manager, Vivaldi process memory doesn't look abnormal - around 300M to 1M.

Can you explain why you pointed out the old profile as a cause? And any idea upon my current explanation? Thanks.

BoneTone

So, if Vivaldi isn't consuming a lot of memory, I would not expect that it is what caused the pagefile to fill up the drive. You could prevent this from ever happening regardless of what process is causing just by setting the size of your pagefile manually rather than letting Windows manage it with an unlimited maximum size. Do you know where that setting is? I'm not at my desk right now, so I can't give exact steps, and they're slightly different depending on which version of Windows you're running. But it's basically something like, right-click on My Computer/This PC, choose properties, click the Performance tab, then the virtual memory settings are on the bottom third of the dialog. Just set the file size to something in the range of 24-32 GB and you should be fine. Do not make it any smaller than 16 GB.

The reason you use a new profile in Vivaldi when you're trying track down a problem is that it will have no extensions and no weird setting or data issues. You're working with just a vanilla Vivaldi setup to see if it's caused by something in your profile.

It's funny that you mention Grammarly, that's one of the websites that does the crazy tracking problem I described in my previous post. For me it doesn't do much in the way of memory, it's slamming the CPU. Maxed out CPU issues often exhibit as nonresponsive systems or apps, while maxed out memory can exhibit several different behaviors depending on how the kernel handles that. Sometimes it'll just plain kill a process, which can lead to data loss and an appearing nonresponsive if it doesn't disappear. In reality it'd be nonexistent not nonresponsive, and there is an issue with the window manager not redrawing the desktop.

But after that happened, I got rid of Grammarly. There were two issues I had with it that became clear from that -- 1) they're really interested in collecting data on people, so their extension is almost certainly doing just that, and 2) they're not nearly as interested in writing good code, if there's a decision between performance and data collection, they'll screw the user and fight to the death if the CPU to get the data.

Back to trying to diagnose the root cause of your issue. When it happens, check the task managers, and maybe even use resource monitor as well. Sort by memory use and see if there's anything obviously large. Just because Vivaldi is the only application that you manually started doesn't mean it's the only thing that could be the cause. There are a bunch of services and other background processes running from the moment three system starts and even more after you login. Fur example, if you use any cloud storage you've likely got some of their code running all the time, monitoring your system for changes and monitoring the server for changes and comparing any it finds between the two. That's just one example of many, video card & GPU processes, motherboard manufacturer processes, display manufacturer processes, etc. could be managing the device, monitoring the system and hitting the network for updates, and that's just a couple hardware examples.

So really you need to investigate to figure out what culprit is. Has it happened fairly recently? If you can recall the day, or within a few days, you could try looking through the system logs to see what was written there when it happened. Bring up the run dialog (start /v run, or Win-R) and run eventvwr to launch the Event Viewer where you can look into a bunch of different logs including system ones. There could very well be something in there that will indicate which process(es) maxed out your memory.

Hope this helps. It was sort of rambling, I'm half asleep right now. But let me know if you've any further questions.

BoneTone

If it's Windows 10 that you're using, get to the pagefile settings via...

Run Prompt
SystemPropertiesComputerName.exe
Advanced tab
Performance section -> Settings button
Advanced tab
Virtual Memory section -> Change button

ilp0000

Deep, cordial thanks to you, Bonetone. No one has been this attentive like you before.

More exactly, this disk-full behavior began last September. 2 changes have been suspected; one was Windows update and the other was one software installation. And more direct impacts were taken into one by one such as virus, abnormal processes, etc. Finally, a month ago I reinstalled Windows and it looks ok for a while but happened again.

I am running Windows 8 on bootcamp with 16G RAM, and I have tracked down most actions you suggested to find the troublemaker. Recently what I found is when the pagefile is increasing, 2 processes runs with the exact same CPU usage - host process for windows and windows installer process, but they may work in the way that one process may be a child process or something (I forgot the details about OS architecture). One doubt is that Windows installer related to windows updates runs though I disabled checking or installing Windows updates in Control panel. But before reinstalling Windows, I disabled the Windows installer manually then another Windows something that I don't remember now ran instead. So I gave up and reinstalled, but that might be another cause, I am not sure.

Virtual memory has been set to 12G, which is not large and I am a heavy user on ram and cpu. I know this disk-full issue is really hard to track but if Vivaldi isn't the torublemaker, there isn't any clue that I can figure out.

Oh, as you suggested, I deleted the grammary - again, so I am gonna see any changes for a while.

Thanks again, Bonetone!

Komposten

When you see that your page file is filling up like that, open Resource Monitor (open the start menu, type resmon and press enter). Go to the Memory tab and sort by "Commit (KB)". This should show the memory of all processes, including paged data.

As an example, I was messing around with some 3D rendering code a while back and accidentally allocated a 20 GB data buffer. Task Manager showed normal memory usage (a few hundred MBs), when I looked under Commit in resmon I could see the 20+ GB (since it was a single data buffer of that size it probably paged the whole thing).

ilp0000

@Komposten Thank you for your info. Is it only effective while the pagefils is filling up? After filling up, the resource monitor shows only within RAM size, though Vivaldi occupies the most. Otherwise, it may be some Windows related file but those system files don't tend to see in the resource monitor - or can we see?

BTW, how can you be a Vivaldi translator?

greybeard

@LonM You're quite right. I have mine set at 4Gb.
As an aside, I have the manual someplace, in the days of OS/2, Win 95/98, it was recommended by the gurus that Swap Space be 1.5xRAM.
No longer necessary with machines having 8Gb + of RAM.

Komposten

@ilp0000 said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

@Komposten Thank you for your info. Is it only effective while the pagefils is filling up? After filling up, the resource monitor shows only within RAM size, though Vivaldi occupies the most. Otherwise, it may be some Windows related file but those system files don't tend to see in the resource monitor - or can we see?

Shouldn't matter whether you check while it's filling up or when it's already full. But if something is using that much RAM/page file, you should probably see it in resmon (unless it's some hidden Windows service or something).

(Disclaimer: I'm not exactly an expert on these things. Just talking from experience.)

BTW, how can you be a Vivaldi translator?
If you want to help translate Vivaldi (that's an unpaid volunteer position, by the way), just send a message to @Shpankov. Say what language you want to help translate Vivaldi to and he'll help you get started.

ilp0000

@Komposten Thanks for all you info.

Yes, I just found one thing particular. For the same Vivalvi process, task manager shows 850M but resource manager does 1.2G. RAM usage is 90% this moment, which would mean that the gap is running on the virtual. 2 windows with around 180 tabs are running, which would estimate 14G on vivaldi, 2.4 on others and 1.6 idle.

Now can we conclude that Vivaldi causes this disk-full phenomena? Anyone, Help!!

BoneTone

Just to clarify something about pagefile sizes. On systems where the pagefile is used for hibernation, you want to size it at least equal to the amount of physical RAM, most likely a little larger as the minimum, otherwise you're going to have problems trying to hibernate. See the Linux documentation for info.

Windows uses a separate file named hiberfile.sys if I remember right, but it does use the pagefile for crash dumps. So the crash dump settings play a role in how big the file should be. You can save those system crash dumps to a dedicated file if you want to disable or shrink the pagefile, but that's not always the preferable thing to do.

How to determine the appropriate page file size for 64-bit versions of Windows. That provides more details.

ilp0000

@bonetone said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

s if I remember right, but it does use the pagefile for crash dumps. So the crash dump settings play a role in how big the file should be. You can save those system crash dumps to a dedicated file if you want to disable or shrink the pagefile, but that's not always

Thank you again, Bonetone. I have checked the hiberfil.sys that is always fixed at 13G in my case. And on the option for pagefil.sys, it has be set as "automatic management- this couldn't be exact term as it is translated," so it increased more as I delete other files to get spare space in the disk. Also I clean disk spaces to delete the dump file and make the space available, but that didn't increase the disk space. It is really hard to crack....

mib2berlin

@ilp0000
Hi, may I over read but wich Vivaldi version you use?
Since Chromium 80.xx the browser hibernate all open tabs after a while automatically and stable is still on 79. Should not be a problem to have 200 tabs open but may one of your tabs is the reason.
Open chrome://settings and search for apps
This is only guessing because it is for apps running after Vivaldi is closed.
Start Vivaldi from a command shell with --disable-extensions or add this to your desktop shortcut.
Something one your system leaks memory and if it not happen without Vivaldi it is either a tab, setting or extension.
It seams you are the only one with the problem or user with 2TB HDD don´t notice it.

Cheers, mib

BoneTone

@ilp0000 Did you empty the recycle bin? Deleted files are probably moved there by default. The recycle bin has a maximum size, so files that are too big will be deleted but they will throw a confirmation dialog before doing so, and as the recycle bin gets full it'll start deleting the older files to stay below its quota.

As for the pagefile, it won't grow just because free space is available, it'll grow as memory is paged to the drive. This could occur because the system is swapping pages to disk due to memory overcommitment, but that's not the only reason that Windows writes pages to disk so more investigation would be required to know if that's why the pagefile is being used. But Windows will grow the pagefile as it use grows, trying to keep no less than 25% of it free, I'm not 100% sure of how it's implemented but probably something like when the percentage used of the pagefile reaches 75% it'll grow the pagefile to drop that down to 50%, maybe less.

BoneTone

Also, FWIW, my Windows system drive is like 460 GB or so. With 64 GB of physical RAM.

ilp0000

@mib2berlin said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

@ilp0000
Hi, may I over read but wich Vivaldi version you use?
Since Chromium 80.xx the browser hibernate all open tabs after a while automatically and stable is still on 79. Should not be a problem to have 200 tabs open but may one of your tabs is the reason.
Open chrome://settings and search for apps
This is only guessing because it is for apps running after Vivaldi is closed.
Start Vivaldi from a command shell with --disable-extensions or add this to your desktop shortcut.
Something one your system leaks memory and if it not happen without Vivaldi it is either a tab, setting or extension.
It seams you are the only one with the problem or user with 2TB HDD don´t notice it.

Cheers, mib

@mib2berlin Thanks for your explanation. I only use 4 extensions - one is ad-blocker that you are familiar with; a dictionary ext that only works when I double-click a word in a text; a timer ext that I don't use; and gmail ext that enables desktop notification. I am not sure they are going to be that serious problem.

@bonetone said in Pagefile.sys increases till hard disk gets full:

@ilp0000 Did you empty the recycle bin? Deleted files are probably moved there by default. The recycle bin has a maximum size, so files that are too big will be deleted but they will throw a confirmation dialog before doing so, and as the recycle bin gets full it'll start deleting the older files to stay below its quota.

As for the pagefile, it won't grow just because free space is available, it'll grow as memory is paged to the drive. This could occur because the system is swapping pages to disk due to memory overcommitment, but that's not the only reason that Windows writes pages to disk so more investigation would be required to know if that's why the pagefile is being used. But Windows will grow the pagefile as it use grows, trying to keep no less than 25% of it free, I'm not 100% sure of how it's implemented but probably something like when the percentage used of the pagefile reaches 75% it'll grow the pagefile to drop that down to 50%, maybe less.

@bonetone I keep doing "Disk Cleanup" so recycle bin isn't going to be a problem.

A few hours ago, the worst happened - whenever this disk-full issue comes, another big issue often happens. After reinstalling the Windows, it had not happened but finally did - not waking up from hibernation. The Macbook does not wake up from hibernation but more exactly saying, it does not go into complete hibernation, which means that the screen turns off but the fan still runs! As the screen turned off, I have no ways to check if the Windows is running, which processes are running, or etc., but one thing sure is that the fan keeps running. The only way to stop is hard-booting.

And now I figured out that after this hard booting, the pagefil.sys maintains 8G size without using any apps how many times it is rebooted. It will be freed at a certain moment that I cannot catch, then I will find the free disk space gets larger.

I had experienced this "no waking up" pheonomenon more than 10 times before reinstalling the Windows, but now it happens again. I always open and use a lot of apps but for those 10 or so times, Vivaldi was always opened - still, it cannot be assured that Vivaldi caused it.

I'll sum up this phenomena again through my experiences and inspections.

For some reason, disk space gets filled.
- pagefil.sys must be a major one filling the space.
  - could be another system file or something.
- Whenever that happens, Vivaldi was always opened with more than 100 tabs.
  - I have doubted other apps or automatic updates or others so I deleted them, disabled them, and did all actions in all possible scenarios, except for Vivaldi.
  - Grammary is not a cause.
  - When Vivald was only app running, it happened as well.
Regardless of whether the disk is completely full or not, after the laptop goes into hibernation mode, it doesn't wake up.
- In some cases, it wakes up, but for some, it doesn't.
  - I have no idea of what causes this "not waking-up"
- Hard-boot is inevitable, and then the pagefil.sys begins occupied with 8G even after a couple of rebooting.
- whenever it happens, combination of apps varied but Vivaldi was always opened.

Anyone knows the solution? Should I buy a new PC - oh, no, please....

BoneTone

How old is the PC? It sounds like maybe the hard drive isn't actually filling up but rather malfunctioning. This could be completely unrelated to the pagefile and your SSD is just causing errors.

Look into the system log and see what errors occurred, that will help to know what's happening.