A seriously dumb question

[twolfson 0]

Looking at Task manager there is a column labeled page faults.

What are they

Where do they come from (I've got a lot of them).

Do I want to get rid of them?,,,if so, how?

TIA,

 

Terry

[Uykucu 0]

You are really talkinag about application logs are you not?

[JP- 0]

No hes talking about task manager. If you want to see, load up task man and click view-->select columns and select the page fault tick box. As far as i know they are perfectly normal, i mean right now iexplore.exe has managed 29,500 of em 8)

[twolfson 0]

exactly...

and if they're called page faults, they can't be good...can they?

[AndyFair 0]

As far as I know (and I may be wrong here, it's happened before ) a page fault happens when a program requests some data in memory that is not currently stored in RAM, but is in the paging file (aka swap file, aka virtual memory) - hence the term page fault.

 

It's a perfectly normal thing to see - in theory, the more RAM you have, the fewer page faults you should see. Although you'll probably never see them go away because Windows still uses it's virtual memory, to keep RAM as free as possible (although we all know how good it is at doing this!!)

 

Hope this helps,

AndyF

 

PS - I tried to look on the web to see if I could find an explanation of why page faults still happen in a system with sh*tloads of RAM, but couldn't find anything - anyone want to shed some light on the situation?

[JP- 0]

OK this is direct from the windows help, and its not a problem.

 

Page Fault

In Task Manager, page fault is the number of times data has to be retrieved from disk for a process because it was not found in memory. The page fault value accumulates from the time the process started.

[twolfson 0]

Well then, I guess that explains it...thanks.

Sometimes I'm like a dog chasing my own tail.