How do I use "Performance Monitor" tool for page file/RAM usage?

[GoodEnough]

Is this pagefile monitoring window in percentage units, so if you've averaging 100%, you need more RAM?

The problem is this window only shows the last 2 minutes.
How do I see the last 3 hours, so I know if I pinned my RAM usage, etc?
How do I zoom out on the X-axis?

 

[Sequences]

A great learning experience would be to use Powershell, write a script that collects counters on various things, and then plot it. You may learn some interesting correlations.

 

[Cerb]

But, what do you look at?

If the page file has to be made bigger, you probably need more RAM. If your cached RAM is decreasing a lot, combined with hard faults climbing, you probably need more RAM.

Page file usage doesn't tell you much, on its own. Windows tries to use the page file as much as it can, before it needs to slow things down by paging out to it.

 

[KingFatty]

Look for the little button corresponding to "Properties." Or access properties through the menu after you click on the corresponding icon for the performance monitor under the monitoring tools.

Click that and brings up properties, where you can see that the "General" tab under properties allows you to customize the graph elements, by changing the sample rate and the duration.

So if you want to see information for a long duration, just increase that number. If you want to sample more or less frequently, change the "sample every" number. You have the default settings which will only show a short amount of time. But if you want 3 hours, change your duration to (3 hrs x 60 mins/hr x 60 secs/hr) = 10800 seconds.

Please note, that there is a limit to the total number of entries that can be displayed. If you change the duration to 10800, you'll need to increase the "sample every" accordingly (for example, a "sample every" of 20 seconds will work with a duration of 10800 seconds).