"Page Faults" in Task Manager

  • Thread starter Thread starter Noozer
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Noozer

Just curious... I just opened my Task Manager (Win XP Pro SP2) and added
"Page Faults" as one of my columns. My PC has been booted for about 20
minutes now and most of the software running has over 1,000 page faults with
several over 20,000.

Is this normal? Does it indicate hardware issues?

The PC is stable and I've had no real issues (except trying to get some
Stardock software working properly).
 
Noozer said:
Just curious... I just opened my Task Manager (Win XP Pro SP2) and added
"Page Faults" as one of my columns. My PC has been booted for about 20
minutes now and most of the software running has over 1,000 page faults
with several over 20,000.

Is this normal? Does it indicate hardware issues?

The PC is stable and I've had no real issues (except trying to get some
Stardock software working properly).
Click to expand...

Just thought I'd post an update...

After doing a bunch of searching it looks like "Page Faults" are normal and
aren't really "faults" at all.

When Windows asks for some data from memory it might not be in RAM but
instead be in the swap file. If this is the case a "page fault" occurs,
which causes the requested data to be brought in from the swap file.

I still don't understand why I'm getting so many thousands of page faults
though, as I've got a Gig of memory and Outlook Express is the "heaviest"
piece of software I've loaded since booting.

Commit Charge total is 278,148. Peak is only 640,744. Under Physical Memory
I'm showing a total of 1,046,956 with 655,592 available.

I guess I could toss more memory into my PC, but I can't see it making much
of a difference.
 
Page faults are normal, invalid page faults are not normal.
Windows will swap out data to the page file (and remove in from RAM) even when there is free memory. I believe this is carried over from the days when most people did not have sufficient memory and window had to constantly page out data to keep from running out of free memory. You can reduce the problem by adding more memory, but you can not completely eliminate it.
 
Noozer said:
Just curious... I just opened my Task Manager (Win XP Pro SP2) and added
"Page Faults" as one of my columns. My PC has been booted for about 20
minutes now and most of the software running has over 1,000 page faults with
several over 20,000.

Is this normal?
Click to expand...

Yes.

Does it indicate hardware issues?

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_fault
 
It is page faults / second that is critical not page faults themselves. You
might find
it interesting to run the performance monitor which will dynamically show
your
pages / second in graphical form.

Gary
 
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