Pagefile size limits on Windows Server 2003

Some moths ago I posted a Blogpost called “Pagefile size bigger than 4095MB on Windows Server 2003“. In this post I wrote about the pagefile size limit of 4096MB. Today I got a comment on this post which shows another solution for this.

If you use the /PAE (Wikipedia Link: Physical Address Extension) switch, the pagefile is not limited to 4096MB anymore. Using the PAE switch limits the pagefile to 16TB, this should be enough for the most Windows Server 2003 32-bit systems. If you don’t use PAE the limit of the Pagefile remains 4GB.

By the way, Windows Server 2003 x64 can also have pagefiles up to 16TB and Windows Server 2003 for IA64 systems can have pagefiles up to 32TB. And for all versions, Windows Server 2003 supports up to 16 pagefiles.

For more information on memory limits in Windows Server 2003 check out this TechNet Blog post.

Thank goes to Ethan Anderson for giving me this information.

Pagefile size bigger than 4095MB on Windows Server 2003

UPDATE: If you can use PAE on your Windows Server 2003 you should check out this post: Pagefile size limits on Windows Server 2003

The pagefile size on Windows Server 2003 x86 and other Windows x86 platforms is limited to 4095 MB per pagefile. But a lot of Windows Server 2003 systems already have 4GB RAM and are using PAE (Physical Address Extension) to use them. So it would be useful to create more than 4 GB pagefiles.

Microsofts solution for this is to create multiple pagefiles. You can now create multiple pagefiles on different partitions. If you don’t have enough partitions or you just have one, you can create multiple pagefile in different folders by using the Windows Registry.

Pagefiles

  1. Create the folders on the drive where the pagefiles should be located. For example, C:\Pagefile1, C:\Pagefile2, and C:\Pagefile3.
  2. Open regedit.exe
  3. I would recommend to create a backup of the registry
  4. locate this key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemoryManagement
  5. Edit the value “PagingFiles”
  6. Remove the existing values and add the following values:
    C:\Pagefile1\pagefile.sys 4096 4096
    C:\Pagefile2\pagefile.sys 4096 4096
    C:\Pagefile3\pagefile.sys 4096 4096
  7. Save this

Note: It’s still recommended to have the Pagefiles on the same partition as the system

You can get more information in this Microsoft Knowledge Base entry: How to overcome the 4,095 MB paging file size limit in Windows

How to do this with Powershell: Powershell: Changing registry key value