It still made sense when 640KB of memory was “ enough for anyone”. Mainframe computers from the 1960s were already using it! It made a lot of sense when RAM was measured in dozens of kilobytes. RAM paging is one of the oldest memory management methods in existence. Having a bit of slowdown to handle peak RAM demands is better than having the system go down as a whole. So if the page file is so slow, why even have it? Without a page file, your applications will crash or seriously malfunction, as any additional information that needs to be stored in RAM will simply be lost. The only difference is that reading information from a hard drive is much, much slower than RAM.
From the application’s point of view, it’s just more RAM. When your apps need more RAM than your computer physically has, it needs to use “virtual memory” which is exactly what the page file is.
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