1

I just installed some extra RAM and set my paging file size to 0 for all drives on my Win7 machine. Task manager shows plenty of physical memory as being free, yet some processes are still experiencing a "pagefault delta," or PF delta. Why is this?

Ref here for a similar question, although with a different focus.

Community
  • 1
Aaron Thomas
  • 337
  • 3
  • 17
  • it does not matter, the system lives to page fault :-) that is how it works on purpose. Fire up the Resource monitor instead, and in the memory section set to show "Hard Faults" , which is not paging specific either but at least disk specific. I am an advocate of turning off paging, but you must know that some programs will fail with stupid errors if they do not see one, so a small paging set somehwere would be "better" like 512M at least. – Psycogeek Nov 18 '14 at 02:03
  • @Psycogeek: You can't turn off paging. You can only disable the pagefile. But paging to and from disk will still happen. – Jamie Hanrahan Mar 17 '19 at 09:49

3 Answers3

4

Extending virtual memory using swapfiles/pagefiles isn't the only use of paging.

Read-only data like programs' executable code, or more generally memory-mapped files, are also loaded on demand using paging, directly from the original files. They might have been pushed out of RAM by cached files that were more needed at some moment.

u1686_grawity
  • 426,297
  • 64
  • 894
  • 966
  • 2
    In addition, the file system cache works by paging. The cached files are simply memory-mapped files. So they (like all memory-mapped files) are in effect the "page file" for the ranges of virtual address space into which they're mapped. (I upvoted your a.) – Jamie Hanrahan Nov 18 '14 at 08:34
1

Your memory will gradually fill with dirty pages that may never be read again. With no page file, these must remain in memory forever, forcing the system to eject clean pages. When these clean pages are needed, they fault back in, causing excessive, wasteful page faults. Put your pagefile back and let your system function the way its designers intended.

David Schwartz
  • 61,528
  • 7
  • 100
  • 149
0

There are different types of pagefault. What you want to avoid are hard page faults, when data must be read from the disk. But there are also soft pagefault, where data is in the standby cache/Superfetch cache and this is shown in taskmgr.

magicandre1981
  • 97,301
  • 30
  • 179
  • 245