Windows performance page faults sec

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Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks. Popular Topics in Windows Server. Spiceworks Help Desk. The help desk software for IT. Track users' IT needs, easily, and with only the features you need. Only make one adjustment at a time and test so if things suddenly get better you will know which adjustment did the trick. If that is the case, since the Page Faults column is not usually displayed, if you enabled it, perhaps you are looking for some performance issue.

A Page Fault does not mean there is a problem. Just because the name has the word "fault" in it does not mean something bad is happening. A Page Fault generally means the application needs some data that is not in the physical memory RAM at the time. When the application needs some data that is not in the local memory and has to retrieve it from the Paging File on the hard disk that is one way you will see a Page Fault generated.

It sounds sort of bad since it has the word "Fault" in it, but it is really normal. If you invoke your Task Manager after a reboot don't use any browser , all the applications are likely to have at least some page Faults even though you just rebooted and haven't "done" anything yet.

Some applications might generate a few hundred or few thousand Page Faults on a restart and then not change. The only thing in Task Manager that will have zero Page Faults is the System Idle Process, but that is a special case: Knowing what a Page Fault is, you can understand that if your system might not have enough RAM for your operations, then Windows is going to need to go out to the Paging File more often to get the stuff it needs because the stuff it needs might not be in RAM when it needs it.

Every time it does that, you will have a Page Fault. The less RAM you have, the more your applications will have to hit the Paging File to get their data, but you may be able to control some of that, and you may not even "notice" the Page Faults at all - they are happening all the time. That sounds good, but that is not the way things work. Windows works best when you have a Paging File set to System Managed Size usually so you would probably not want to run without a Paging File.

A hard Page fault would be an access to the Paging File on the hard disk. A soft Page Fault would just be a shuffling or rearranging of things that are in already in memory. Task Manager just lumps them all into the Page Fault column and you can't tell the difference between the two.

Since Task Manager lumps both kinds of page Faults into one column you will need other performance monitoring tools with more granularity like Perfmon that allow you to separate Page Faults into so ft Page Faults and hard Page Faults.