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In case anyone else sees this problem:
A customer reported the Memory (RAM) test failed in under a minute on a system. The error was "No free memory for buffer".
This was on Win11 with no other tests running in BurnIntest.
The system had 16GB of installed RAM and BurnInTest attempted to allocate 11.6GB of this for testing (memory load of 83% at the time). Leaving what should have been enough free RAM for Windows to run in without error.
Instead it failed. The detailed log showed this error when trying to allocate a additional block of 100MB for testing.
LOG NOTE: 2025-05-09 06:35:58, Memory (RAM), Process 2, Failed to allocate test RAM.
Subsequent investigation showed the system was configured without a paging file (which isn't normal). In theory Windows can run without a paging file. But it can also be expected to fail during periods of high memory load. Configuring a paging file fixed the problem.
So far this issue was only seen on one system when running WinPE, a HP Z2 Tower G9 system.
Note: The paging file is also (incorrectly) referred to as virtual memory in Windows settings.
This didn't seem to happen in the past. So maybe there was a recent change in Windows. Our first theory is that, even if not strictly necessary, Windows writes out some of the unused system RAM to paging file preemptively even when there is a small amount of free RAM still available. Second theory is that Windows preemptively fails memory allocations from a task using a lot of RAM when it knows the paging file doesn't exist (or can't be made larger). i.e. rather than allowing the last few MB to be allocated it keeps it free to maintain system stability.
Anyway, there is no reason to turn off your paging file. Leave it on and use the "Automatic" setting.
A customer reported the Memory (RAM) test failed in under a minute on a system. The error was "No free memory for buffer".
This was on Win11 with no other tests running in BurnIntest.
The system had 16GB of installed RAM and BurnInTest attempted to allocate 11.6GB of this for testing (memory load of 83% at the time). Leaving what should have been enough free RAM for Windows to run in without error.
Instead it failed. The detailed log showed this error when trying to allocate a additional block of 100MB for testing.
LOG NOTE: 2025-05-09 06:35:58, Memory (RAM), Process 2, Failed to allocate test RAM.
Subsequent investigation showed the system was configured without a paging file (which isn't normal). In theory Windows can run without a paging file. But it can also be expected to fail during periods of high memory load. Configuring a paging file fixed the problem.
So far this issue was only seen on one system when running WinPE, a HP Z2 Tower G9 system.
Note: The paging file is also (incorrectly) referred to as virtual memory in Windows settings.
This didn't seem to happen in the past. So maybe there was a recent change in Windows. Our first theory is that, even if not strictly necessary, Windows writes out some of the unused system RAM to paging file preemptively even when there is a small amount of free RAM still available. Second theory is that Windows preemptively fails memory allocations from a task using a lot of RAM when it knows the paging file doesn't exist (or can't be made larger). i.e. rather than allowing the last few MB to be allocated it keeps it free to maintain system stability.
Anyway, there is no reason to turn off your paging file. Leave it on and use the "Automatic" setting.