Page Faults

[jjsimas]

My WinMe installation page faults constantly, even when at idle. The Kernel processor can be down to 0%-5% yet the page faults are averaging like 20 per second. I have 128MB of RAM and don't think there should be any page faults at idle with no program open. I mean there are some tray programs running but these shouldn't be enough to cause page faults.

Maybe it has to do with my Promise FastTrak66 Controller and RAID configuration?

Any Ideas on how to stop the page faulting?

Jason

 

[AndyHui]

Is your system overclocked?

 

[jjsimas]

Negative on the overclocking. However, I don't see what overclocking has to do with it. AFAIK, paging is related to allocating more virtual memory to a program then real memory. Then, when a program needs to access an instruction outside of what's really allocated, the OS has to grab that page off the disk and load it into memory. But with 128MB of RAM, the OS should be loading the whole programs into memory rather than using virtual memory (when idling with no programs open).

Jason

 

[Spiff]

it does not necessarily have to grab it from the hd. it could be grabbing pages from cache or it could be loaded from a file. what you are seeing is actually normal behaviour.

An application may not know if information has been loaded already. The app requests it from VMM. VMM then looks for the info (page). If the page is not found in executing system RAM for that program, the VMM must look elsewhere. This is known as a page fault.

 

[jjsimas]

I characterized page faulting correctly. disk or disk cache doesn't matter to me. It tries to access the disk, but the disk cache mechanism determines that cache has it. I don't need to explain every detail.

Bottom line, I think is that with 128MB of ram, and with no programs open.. Windows should not be page faulting consistently at 15 per second. Windows should have everything it needs in RAM.

Jason