Chrome tabs tend to get swapped out to SSD quite quickly. Re-opening those tabs takes a few seconds now, compared to instantly before. Am pondering adding another 8 GB for a total of 16 to see if it helps...
I wonder you're experiencing a use case where you'd see notable perf improvements from a pcie ssd. Jeff Atwood blogged about his upgrade to a faster ssd last week: http://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-pc-part-viii-iterati...
Of course, assuming you have unused RAM, it would be nice if the OS would just use the RAM available before swapping to SSD.
I have an old Linux box running with 4GB of ram under my desk right now and it is borderline unusable for surfing the web with Chrome if I have any other applications open in the background. Firefox isn't as bad but it is also not a pleasant experience either.
At home, I have a laptop with 2GB of ram that I've upgraded to Windows 10 and the Windows Edge browser is also virtually unusable because of memory usage with more than a couple of tabs open.
Overall very informative and he's good at explaining. At first I thought the concept was stupid but it's actually clever. Also: "If you have enough memory [...] nothing is gonna get compressed either." So it's not like this slows you down if you don't have to worry about memory size (like me).
You should never disable the page file, no matter how much physical memory you have. Just set it to system managed and it will usuyally sit around 1-2Gb usage.
For explanations as to why you shouldn't disable it;
https://superuser.com/questions/810170/should-i-disable-swap...
https://serverfault.com/questions/23621/any-benefit-or-detri...
http://www.howtogeek.com/126430/htg-explains-what-is-the-win...
The way windows handles virtual memory hasn't changed much up to Windows 7. Windows 10 changes it up a bit but you still shouldn't be disabling it completely.
I don't use Windows 10 but I read that the uncontrollable updates which take long time are very annoying. Is it really that bad?
I guess it will slightly reduce the overall security but as I only use it as a VM and am generally testing locally its an acceptable trade off in my opinion. The reason I set it up this way was to avoid the time sinks that come from when I do use Windows and then have to wait an age for updates to be done when I'm focusing on work. Previously I always used the option to be notified about updates rather than auto install which was a reasonable trade off. I understand why Microsoft made the change but I strongly disagree with it.
Related: I wish Apple did more things like this, videos explaining the internals of the system. The OS X kernel source code is open but you need a deep understanding of Mach and OS internals to understand what's going on. And most processes and services running on the background are closed source and who the hell knows what's going on.
What goes on underneath, while interesting, is not guaranteed to be stable. They might, say, replace x86 with ARM one day, as they already replaced PPC with x86. If you're targeting "the OSX platform", that doesn't affect you; you just hit rebuild in XCode. If you're targeting the underlying computer, you're screwed. Apple doesn't want you to be screwed (really, they don't!), so they try to disincentivize relying on anything below the public API.
Compare this to Microsoft, where the Windows team deals with cases like these[1] by inserting compatibility shims to keep the behavior of applications using undocumented, non-public-APIs (or munging kernel-shared opaque structs, even) stable between OS releases. While it's great for end-users—their apps don't break—it incentivizes relying on private APIs, because Microsoft will effectively keep your app running for you.
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481...
