Thousands of page faults per second while page file lies empty

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So, in my office system, things are going crazy. Every thing was extremely slow, so much so that switching tabs on chrome took 10 seconds. So, I checked the performance monitor for the issues.

Apparently, my system has only couple MB free, and rest all used up by normal processes like chrome, skype etc. So, I doubled the page file size, and added one more page file in another drive. But, even then same problem.

Realizing, it might be page file issue, I added counters for the same in performance monitor. And guess what, average usage is 0.15% only. At the same time, my system keeps going crazy with page faults because of lack of ram.

Now, I have no idea what to do to resolve this problem.

jitendragarg

Posted 2014-11-25T03:04:52.430

Reputation: 344

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follow this: http://pastebin.com/MVdhhLUD

– magicandre1981 – 2014-11-25T04:56:58.583

Which windows it is could be important here, XP for example would page-out a minimised program. All the windows systems will only have "some MB free" (after much use), but still classed as "Available" because what they call "standby" is mostly cached file items, that will be freed as needed. A program called RamMap http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx could be used to show better where the ram itself is used. What is your installed ammount of ram? how much of it is used for any Video ram? Did you check the Resource Monitor in the CPU section for usage and frequency?

– Psycogeek – 2014-11-25T05:00:59.480

1I am using Windows 7. I tried moving the page file to different drive, keep one file on both drives. I have 4gb of ram, out of which 128mb is used for internal gpu. I checked performance monitor, and cpu usage keeps fluctuating between 10% to 40%. Every time I try to switch between chrome and Visual studio or explorer, system slows down. And only thing running in the background is Symantec antivirus, and Skype. – jitendragarg – 2014-11-25T06:02:23.363

capture a xperf trace while you use Visual Studio and have the issue – magicandre1981 – 2014-11-25T16:39:10.630

Ok, will do that. Although, I think it has less to do with VS and more to do with page file access. Anyway, we will see. – jitendragarg – 2014-11-26T04:41:09.427

Answers

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I realise this is a late reply and may not be the direct cause of your issue, but you mention this being in an office and there is an interesting post on the Microsoft blog describing something similar; The Case of the Disappearing Memory.

The short of the long of it is their server was running a virus scanner in the background that was silently dropping all of it's efforts into the RAM, causing it to inexplicably vapourise while it was running.

bg49ag

Posted 2014-11-25T03:04:52.430

Reputation: 26

Hi. Thanks for the response, man. To be honest, I left that organization soon after that. And yes, turns out it was their antivirus causing the problem. Just that task manager was not listing the antivirus because it was running on another user. Weird issue for sure. – jitendragarg – 2017-06-14T14:16:21.017

Asked: 2014-11-25T03:04:52.430

Viewed: 646 times

Active: 2017-06-14T13:42:41.437