thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

IT Support & Hardware · Intermediate

Paging File

Disk space used by the OS as virtual memory when physical RAM is full (pagefile.sys on Windows).

Definition

Windows moves inactive memory pages to pagefile.sys, letting the system run more programs than physical RAM allows at the cost of performance. Linux uses a swap partition or swap file, and macOS uses swap files. The page file is managed in System Properties > Advanced > Performance settings.

Example

Configure a custom pagefile size via SystemPropertiesAdvanced > Performance > Advanced > Virtual memory.

Exam tip

Constant disk activity and slowness under load suggests heavy paging; add RAM rather than enlarging the page file.

Related terms