I was using all 12GB so I've just bumped it up to 24GB. And it wasn;'t even using all my RAM either. I think it was only using 6 out of 8GB.
PA isn't responsible for deciding what is put into the virtual memory. It doesn't even know virtual memory exists. So Windows would be responsible, though I can't imagine it really would use 12GB virtual memory, your system has to be a slow crawl at that point?
If you set a really high pagefile, your PC will use more of it instead of RAM and it will actually make some things slower?... *Shrug* all I know is that Windows is pretty good at deciding what to use, and leaving all the settings on default/auto is best unless you're doing something really weird.
has to be something on your computer, my system barely uses the page file with only 16G of memory. What are you running on your computer at the time this was being monitored?
Nope, it's not work this way. There might be some nasty glitches when you have extremely small (10-50MB) or extremely big page files (like 100GB+), but usually Windows do it's job pretty well. As colin said it's not something under game control. And yeah you will never see 100% of RAM used on Windows ever because system trying to protect itself from "out of memory" behaviour because once system have no RAM to allocate (e.g not just low, but zero) it's dead. Also sometimes there is badly written drivers or configuration that make system "reserve" some part of your RAM, but I not sure if "Task Manager" can actually check that so better try "Resource Monitor".
What was I running? I was running PA. It was PA which was using all the virtual memory. When I increased the pagefile to 24GB it started allocating more to the pagefile and I started getting bad performance. I've changed it so that Windows manages the pagefile now.