Originally Posted by
ohliuw
You are missing a point here. Swap file is a swap file (albeit called differently) in Windows, Linux, Esxi, etc. Say you have 16G ram. Once it's filled up and the machine needs to put 1g in RAM, it will take 1g from the RAM and put it on the hdd (the swap file). Then it will take the new data and put in the empty space in the memory.
It makes no sense to put something reduce the memory to put there something that is supposed to be used only when the memory is full
Well, not exactly for Windows. As a legacy of architecture begun with NT 3.x when 128mb was a lot of RAM, Windows will actually prefer some swap file usage and then use RAM to cache the actively used portions of the swap file. I agree that it doesn't make sense to put a swap file in RAM, though. There may be specific instances with specific OS's, but I think any benefit seen in Windows would be a freak occurrence.