Chrome, Discord and Visual Studio 2019 instability with low pagefile size

So this is an interesting scenario. I have 16GB of RAM and found out windows had somehow created a 64GB page file. I thought that was excessive and limited it to 16GB manually.

It all seemed to be working okay. I set my c++ research code to run some tests and started watching a video on chrome. I had like 4 tabs open. My code was using stable 2GB and I had 60-70% RAM usage as normal. Then Chrome crashes (unexpected exception code 0x000008). Both my monitors black out after I click out of the error window. Chrome is crashed, Visual Studio has a 'chrome crashed' error and my code is halted. Furthermore, all the windows that I had in my second monitor black out.

After this my computer was just 100% unstable. One of my monitors switched to the windows basic driver. Entirely bizarre. I reset. Opened even less stuff, and just resumed watching my stuff while the code runs, hoping it would be a one time thing. Fifteen minutes in, another crash. This time the Visual Studio doesn't actually crash, but the execution window became invisible as it was in the second monitor.

I went into the chrome dump just to check what it was... sure enough the first line gives: STACK_TEXT:

00000000`00000000 00000000`00000000 chrome.exe!out_of_memory+0x0

Now... at this point I repeat this entire scenario while staring at my RAM usage. Sure enough, the crash happens when I'm at 50% RAM usage. So it seems Chrome is crashing when I ran out of virtual memory, even when I have more than enough physical memory? Why? And why is it crashing in such a catastrophic way ruining other programs?

Sure enough the crashes stopped as soon as I set my virtual memory back to managed by the operating system, but I am still curious about the entire situation.

This can be due to a setting in pagefile know as priority. The priority setting decides whether a program will be given real memory or virtual memory. By default, the foreground processes get real memory, however this could be changed. If this is the case, then Chrome and Visual studio - which already hogs memory puts strain on your disk, while other programs continue to use your disk.

When Chrome crashes, Chrome calls its error reporter, while Windows call a separate crash reporter. This leads to further strain on disk, as these programs create some files.

this may result in crashing of the pagefiling system, therefore the system becomes unresponsive and you see a blank screen. The crashing of pagefile system means that the apps using pagefile also crashes.

No - these program actually do not crash because of running out of memory, but because the disk usage exeeds its limits