I've been playing Football Manager for the past two years with all the leagues around the world activated, my RAM usage has skyrocketed. This also caused my Drive D usage (not storage) to spike to 100%. I thought it was because my custom files and saves were all on Drive D, so I just let it be until my HDD finally died at the end of last year.

Fast forward to the beginning of this year, I've been having a blast playing Cities Skylines. Initially, I was playing with minimal mods (pre-loading took about 10 minutes). But lately, I've been wanting to create custom cities with an Indonesian vibe, so I've downloaded a ton of mods. This, however, caused my RAM and HDD usage to hit 100% again, and pre-loading now takes around 17 minutes.

At first, I thought it was similar to FM, with the custom assets and game directory being on Drive D. But after some thought, what caught my attention from the task manager in my previous tweet was the 100% RAM and HDD usage, while the SSD usage was really minimal.

This got me thinking that maybe the virtual memory pagefile (a temporary file stored on the storage drive when RAM is full) was being placed on the HDD. I was already planning to buy more RAM and an SSD SATA for Drive D (especially since @anang_kur is selling them on IG lol, check out his shop if you need one).

Customising the Pagefile

Finally, I decided to research where the pagefile config is located, and it turns out that by default, the system places it on Drive D (maybe because it's the larger storage drive?). So, I followed these steps to customise the pagefile in Windows 11:

1. Open Windows Settings
2. Go to "System" in the sidebar
3. Click on "About"
4. Open "Advanced System Settings," which will open a new window
5. In the "Advanced" tab, under the "Performance" section, click "Settings"
6. The "Performance Options" window will open. In the "Advanced" tab, under the "Virtual memory" section, click "Change"
7. On my laptop, the default was Drive D (HDD), even though I have an SSD on Drive C. The "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" option was also ticked.
8. Since I chose to customise, I unchecked this option
9. Set Drive D to "No paging file" - click "Set"
10. Set Drive C to "System managed size" - click "Set"
11. Restart your PC/Laptop

The drive used for the pagefile depends on where your SSD is installed. After applying this config, with RAM usage above 90%, my laptop feels much lighter. Cities Skylines pre-loading has significantly dropped from 17 minutes to just 5 minutes!

So, if you're experiencing slowdowns or high HDD usage, especially when using memory-intensive applications, check your pagefile settings. Moving the pagefile to your SSD can make a huge difference in performance.

This blog post was initially a tweet on 19 Feb 2024 to answer my friend’s query, but I think this deserves to be my first blog post again after 4 years of stagnant