Reducing Page File Usage

[Aemilius Paulus]

Just yesterday, the game I was playing, Europa Barbarorum (RTW mod), has been running excruciatingly slowly. It took me 30 minutes (!) to load a savegame, something that normally takes no more than two minutes, and usually less than one minute. The game itself was also unusually laggy. So I went to Windows Task Manager to check out what was wrong. I clicked on the performance tab and immediately noticed that the Page File Usage was 3.5 gigs, whereas normally it is less than half a gigabyte.

What is the cause of that? Would restarting help, or is it a virus/worm? I really don't fell like doing virus scans, because I have numerous anti-virus/spyware programs and all together, they take quite a bit of time to scan. Spybot S&D is pretty fast though, so I might do a scan now. I tried closing all of the running applications, and that had absolutely no effect on the Page File Usage. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[Aemilius Paulus]

Allright, I solved the problem, but I still am ignorant of what caused it. Does anyone know?

[Whacker]

RTW 1.5/1.6 still has a memory leak that causes excessive thrashing after certain periods of time. EB could also exacerbate the problem somewhat, it's not exactly known to be bug-free. Another random program may be the cause as well.