Dessimat0r Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 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... 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 More sharing options...
tryfe Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 Wow; I never knew that. So THAT'S why my computer runs sluggish after I leave it on for an extended amount of time. :o Thanks for shedding some light about this. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dessimat0r Posted September 22, 2002 Author Share Posted September 22, 2002 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 More sharing options...
tryfe Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 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 More sharing options...
twist Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 lol my explorer has had 2,600,000 page faults Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maleboja Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 Holy POOP! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AaronXP Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 :s (Rtvscan.exe is NAV Corporate 8) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xelencin Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 aaaaahhhhhh im ****ed my pc has only ben on for 2 days! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vf- Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 interesting O_o Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dessimat0r Posted September 22, 2002 Author Share Posted September 22, 2002 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 More sharing options...
freeza Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thumper Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 Hence why the swap file is called the paging file in windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frod Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 interesting, my explorer.exe currently has 5,724,140 page faults and it's going up at a rate of 4 per second. i wonder what's causing the 4 per second. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mistical Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 memory program: 5,803,988 page faults explorer: 2,023,140, every 1 or 2 secs it goes up by 7 or 8 vsmon.exe: 744,781 :x Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tophat Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mistical Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 I've got 640MB of RAM, so it would be good to disable page filing?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AOXOMOXOA Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 i quess that trick doesnt work in win2k.. so i cant play.:( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tryfe Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 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 More sharing options...
Vlad Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 Anyone who thinks that a page fault indicates something negative doesn't know what they're talking about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azazel- Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 D'oh! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twist Posted September 22, 2002 Share Posted September 22, 2002 photoshop will use your page file for you scratch disk. it gives you an alert if you disable them totally, i found it really annoying so i set mine to 100mb. don't use it much though with 1gb of ram. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dessimat0r Posted September 22, 2002 Author Share Posted September 22, 2002 It is interesting how explorer thrashes the paging file, don't you agree? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dessimat0r Posted September 22, 2002 Author Share Posted September 22, 2002 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 More sharing options...
skooter Posted September 23, 2002 Share Posted September 23, 2002 how do you feel now that you've made a fool of yourself to all the people that know even the slightest bit how an OS works? :rolleyes: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekrosoft13 Posted September 23, 2002 Share Posted September 23, 2002 who cares as long as it works Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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