Page faults --> Are they bad and if so, how do you stop them?

[ran]

Well, I run Win2k on a Celery 333 w/ 256MB RAM. Believe it or not, it runs quite well..unless I'm trying to rip MP3's, browse internet, and run an Atari emulator all at the same time..... Which I don't usually do.......

Anyway, I run task manager all the time just to keep an eye on my system, see what processes are running, and which take up CPU time and such. One thing I've noticed is that some processes have a *HUGE* number of page faults, in the hundred's of thousands after running for a while. Now, my understanding (which is probably faulty) is that a page fault occurs when a program is accessed, but the necessary data is not in RAM, but has been paged to the hard drive (I apologize if that was way too simplistic...)

So, if that is true, is there anyway to force programs to *stay resident* so to speak, and not page themselves to the HD? I realize I can't do this for all programs, just some that seem to have such a high number of page faults....

Is this even necessary? My perhaps naive thinking is that if I keep a program resident, I will reduce the number of page faults and unnecessary access to the HD.

Am I totally off base here?


Randy

 

[Mapidus]

I don't see this in my task manager. Did you have to set an option somewhere? You probably don't have too much control over the virtual memory system though. I probably uses an LRU paging scheme or maybe something more complex and better, but I doubt they give you options to tweak this much.

 

[ran]

Yes, under the "processes tab", just select the options ..> columns and that is where you can see just about everything relating to memory and VM and such......

 

[BadThad]

Page faults are crashes within RAM. What kind of ram do you have? Have you tried pulling it out and reseating it? Check your RAM timings in bios, try to use less agressive settings.

 

[compudog]

A page fault is an error Windows encounters when a program tries to access something in memory that is in use by another program. Usually poorly written software or Windows code itself can cause a page fault. It probably has nothing to do with your hard drive at all.

 

[WhatWasIThinking]

Hey, what time zone is this clock in? It's 3:20, EDT.

I think you're looking for a problem where there isn't one. I ran across the same thing on our corporate db server a couple of months ago and freaked out (I'm 41 and come from the days where page faults were baaaad). I looked into it and found out that they were "soft" page faults (no disk access but I forget the other details). If you're not having performance problems I wouldn't worry about it. Even if you are this probably isn't the problem. I think up to a point lots of page faults is normal.

 

[WhatWasIThinking]

It would help if I knew what day it was.