What Microsoft Dosen't Want You to See in the Bowels of their Operatin


Recommended Posts

A page fault is basically a mess up in the management of memory in an operating system. It causes your PC to slow down very slightly (say, 0.5 nanoseconds) and is not noticable at all.

However, shouldn't Micorsoft have fixed this a long time ago in their operating system? Take a look at this...

taskman.jpg

Fexx0red, eh? You too can see this attrocity by going to Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del), right clicking on one of the column headers, choosing 'select columns...' and then selecting the 'page faults' and 'page faults delta' columns to be displayed.

Page faults is the collective total of all page faults which have occured for the processor, so long as it has been running. Page faults delta refers to the page faults which are in operation at the moment.

Although page faults can occur in Windows XP, they are well handled as to not affect the system. However, there is performance cost to pay for each of these buggers, even if it is very small.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As you can see, the well designed apps on there have a smaller amount of page faults than those which are not.

For example, we all know explorer is one of the more unstable parts of Windows XP. Look at how many page faults it has.

However, if you look at M$ Word, it dosen't have so many. Mainly because they are being pushed by stakeholders to develop a stable application.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've been observing mine and I've noticed the same as you. Explorer has the second most Page Faults on mine and is only beaten by ZoneAlarm's TrueVector Service. Everything is else dwarfed by these two.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

lol... I found out the real definition of a page fault

it is nothing to be worried about :D

An interrupt that occurs when a program requests data that is not currently in real memory. The interrupt triggers the operating system to fetch the data from a virtual memory and load it into RAM.

An invalid page fault or page fault error occurs when the operating system cannot find the data in virtual memory. This usually happens when the virtual memory area, or the table that maps virtual addresses to real addresses, becomes corrupt.

So, basically, its when something is sent to the swap file, instead of being stored in the main memory. A page fault is when it can't find the data in main memory, and then goes to the swap file to look for it

I think it is perfectly normal :D Sorry bout that :cheeky:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by tophat

If you've got a lot of memory (say 512 mb or more), you can pretty much do away with your paging file...

And, it can't fault if it doesn't exist.

This isn't all entirely true. I think there's a few applications/games that actually attempt to access your paging file rather than access your ram. I'm not all entirely sure here but I remember this was the case with like Quake II or some other old game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by tryfe

This isn't all entirely true. I think there's a few applications/games that actually attempt to access your paging file rather than access your ram. I'm not all entirely sure here but I remember this was the case with like Quake II or some other old game.

The Windows XP kernel stays on disk, even when the paging file is disabled, unless you hack the registry.i

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.