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I'm having issues rendering on my laptop after messing with the paging file settings.

I'm not sure what it was before I started messing with it, but after I changed it my benchmark for renderings have dropped more than significantly (250 typical down to 12 now)

While rendering, my physical memory usage is about 95%, my CPU usage is only 4% (which is typically between 70-90%), and my Disk usage is 100%. Disk usage must be my problem, because when I check the resource monitor my the system is writing about 10,000,000 B/sec to the pagefile, while maxwell is reading about 13,000,000 B/sec from the pagefile. This read / write of the pagefile keeps my disk usage at 100% throughout the render.

If I allow windows to "automatically manage the paging file size for all drives," it allocates 12288 to drive C: (OS) and none to the other drive in the RAID. Displayed at the bottom is "Minimum allowed: 16 MB; Recommended: 5107 MB; Currently allocated: 12288 MB". Note I have 12GB of RAM on this laptop.

What started the problem is when I went to manually manage the pagefile myself, and moved the paging file to the other RAID drive (D:), and ever since I haven't been able to render properly. I'm trying to isolate my problem, and this is the only significant change I made to this system since it was able to render correctly, other than removing it's ability to hibernate.

Anyone have any advice? My first step was to allow windows to automatically control the pagefile again, and its back on the C drive, but the problem still persists. I also did a system restore to a date before I made these changes, and that didn't help either.

Thanks in advance for any help!

two things coming to my mind :

- you have to click the "set" button in order to apply changes to the PF in the advanced systems settings page.

- you need to reboot in order to make these changes take effect.

I have done both of these things (actually I've done them both countless times now trying to figure this out)

95% memory usage leads me to believe that your scene is using all of your memory and is being forced to use the HDD which will cause the type of slowdown you're experiencing. Best to optimize your scene as a first step.

Thanks for the response. My scene is pretty optimized...fairly simple materials, no emitters, no displacement, to name a few.

Also of note is that before I made this tweak to my paging file, this same scene file rendered fine with a 210-250 benchmark. Also I should note that I have run this same scene file on my other computer with no problem.

Success! Bubbaloo got me thinking about further optimizations, and I ended up rebuilding the scene file through 3ds max. Same output material-wise, but new scene file, and now it works with a benchmark of over 300. Interestingly, now my RAM usage is around 70%, so you were absolutely right about lack of RAM causing the slowdown - disk usage stays very low, CPU usage back to 100%.

Thanks again for your help