I think I just figured out a Windows 10 bug that has been driving me nuts (Memory Hard Faults/sec)

[UsandThem]

So, for the past 6 months or so, my PC would be fine 99.9% of the time. And then occasionally when sitting at my desktop, playing a game, or really doing anything on my PC, my USB mouse would become choppy, and I couldn't really do anything smoothly. If I was playing a game, I'd have to stop because it was so unbearable.

So I replaced my mouse, reset my computer, etc., yet occasionally this would return. I initially thought maybe it was some other 2.4Ghz interference, but that wasn't it.

Then today I was playing around in my computer when the choppiness returned. I went to my resource monitor, and I notice on the memory tab, it was showing a non-stop stream of 'hard faults/sec' of 100. It never went up or down, and was a steady line of 100. I found this to be odd since I am only using 35% of my installed memory. I decided to take a look at my Windows page file. I have pretty much always left it as "Windows managed", however I decided to manually set the minimum and maximum value to the same size (based on recommended Windows page file size). I restarted my computer, and bam, the choppiness is gone, and the 'hard faults/sec' are near nothing (occasionally a small one pops up, but it's in the 2-5 range).

Very odd that there would be so many hard faults when I have plenty of RAM left in the standby and free status. So just curious has anybody else come across this issue?

 

[bbhaag]

I used to manually set the pagefile on my system but not anymore. I cannot remember the specifics of why I did but I believe it had something to do with ssds and writes. It was not because of system instability like you were experiencing.
Out of curiosity what did you set it to? If I remember right I had it set at 1024-4096.

 

[UsandThem]

I'm not at the PC now, but I think it recommended 1956, so that's what I set it at.

Hopefully that is the issue. It's been driving me nuts for a while now. I looked at available RAM and disk activity before, but I just never looked at the hard faults.

Edit: It's actually set at 1914. And still no non-stop page faults like I was getting. Before this, I was going to start taking a hard look at my 960 EVO being the issue, but every utility reports it at 100% health.

 

[bbhaag]

Sounds like you got to the bottom of your instability issue. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, salt over the shoulder, and all that other stuff.haha
I will say 1914 is an interesting page file setting. I've always followed the 1024, 2048, 4096 rule but if you have found a setting that works for you that is what matters.

 

[UsandThem]

Sounds like you got to the bottom of your instability issue. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, salt over the shoulder, and all that other stuff.haha
I will say 1914 is an interesting page file setting. I've always followed the 1024, 2048, 4096 rule but if you have found a setting that works for you that is what matters.

It's what Windows recommended. I just set it at that, and thought "What the heck, I've tried about everything else".

I know it sounds like an odd fix, as Windows is usually pretty good at taking care of that sort of thing. And to be honest, if I didn't see it for myself, and a new user posted this here, I probably would have been very skeptical. I still have a ways to go on testing it out as that sluggish performance was so random when it happened, but so far so good.

I will add I know it's not motherboard, video card, mouse, PSU, or RAM related as I've upgraded those components over the last several months, and this issue first started before those came into the picture. The CPU stays nice and cool, so I figure that would have been a long shot. My guess before this was the 960 EVO, but at the same time the page faults come from Windows having to hit the hard drive, and at a steady stream of 100 faults/sec hitting the drive, I can see why the mouse movement became choppy and system felt sluggish.

 

[mxnerd]

Exactly the same experience as you. I used to let system managed the page file and once in a while the system will appear no response to keyboard or mouse.

When I checked the performance monitor, I also found that there are a lot of page fault and the disk time increase to 1000ms (I'm still using HDD for my laptop).

I then set the page file to a fixed size as large as installed memory size, and the performance is much better and less page fault.

 

[UsandThem]

Exactly the same experience as you. I used to let system managed the page file and once in a while the system will appear no response to keyboard or mouse.

When I checked the performance monitor, I also found that there are a lot of page fault and the disk time increase to 1000ms (I'm still using HDD for my laptop).

I then set the page file to a fixed size as large as installed memory size, and the performance is much better and less page fault.

I'm finding the same thing here. I actually just got done playing about 45 minutes of Civ5, and it was nice and smooth as I scrolled around the map, no mouse jerkiness, and afterwards I checked the page faults to see if any popped up while playing, and there were none at all. This is my first NVMe drive, so I don't know if the bug is in that protocol or not, but it appears to have fixed my issues as long as nothing changes.

EDIT

Still no constant hard faults, and computer has been doing everything like it should. Played a couple hours of Civ5, and no hard faults reported. I hope this fix stays.

Maybe it was just a bug that affected some users like the 99% constant disk activity issue after a previous update:

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...-windows-10-update-fyi.2494477/#post-38628346