TSGL: Page Faults

[Don Penlington]

At 09:41 PM 7/27/2007 -0700, you wrote:
>I've never seen this option, and do not have that option on any of my 4
>computers>>


View is a function of Task Manager that few people seem to know 
about.  Task Manager is actually quite a powerful diagnostic utility that 
very few people use to its full potential or even know about, except for 
the cut-down basic view we all use and seldom go beyond.  There are many 
diagnostics which can be turned on via its View function, as Hasanat Khan 
mentions.

Problem is, unless you're a technician, most of them don't mean anything 
much to the average user. Shame, all that lovely data going to waste.

Since writing yesterday, my page faults have escalated from 77M to 85M.  Is 
my computer burning out?Just as well they're not all logged (well, I HOPE 
they're not), or the HD would soon be saturated.

I know what page faults are, but I'd like to know what's normal. And what 
keeps them happening continously?

There are plenty of tutorials, but nothing that helps much, other than to 
say that excessive pagefile swapping is detrimental. There's an excellent 
and very clear article on virtual memory, for those wanting to learn about 
this topic, by Alex Nichol at http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php.

If I don't get an easy answer from you experts, I'll investigate 
further---once I know what's normal. I wonder if Safe Mode would be any 
different. If that eliminates the faults, then it will be trial and error 
to find the cause, although I suspect it's something in the operating 
system itself (as it's largely tied to Explorer).

I did a little bit of housekeeing last night, and performance is now pretty 
normal, so I don't think the "excessive(?)" page faulting is anything to 
worry about.

Since writing the above, I turned off a clock add-on ("Chameleon Clock") 
which I know is hooked into Explorer, and which was also showing a large 
number of page faults. That has reduced the page faults in Explorer down 
from 500/sec to 1/sec.

So the number I was getting is clearly abnormal. I guess if I turn 
everything else off I might get it down to zero.  Wheeee.

But there's no improvement in performance.  Maybe it doesn't matter.

Don Penlington


 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
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