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One of our server page file is heavily used while a specific process is running, but the physical memory is only half used (3.5gb / 8gb).
When I stop the process, the page file usage immediatly drops significantly.
My question is what can make page file being used a lot when there is enough physical memory ?
For information, the process is a windows service that will check image files on a network shared directory to optimize the image size when it is too big. The server is running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter SP1.
Jonathan
Posted 2015-05-22T14:46:58.010
Reputation: 113
How much of the pagefile is being used? If it is more than the available RAM, that is your answer. A screenshot might be able to help understand what is going on. – Cfinley – 2015-05-22T16:39:59.457
I'm looking at the Pages/sec memory performance counter. When the process is running the counter remains constantly around 500-1000, and the server is having performance issues. When I stop the process, the counter stays almost always at 0, with few short peeks of +/-100 but drop back immediatly. – Jonathan – 2015-05-22T18:17:48.203
I noticed the thread priority is set to BelowNormal, may it explain that Windows uses the page file for it in order to keep physical memory available for processes with higher priority ? – Jonathan – 2015-05-22T20:10:48.263
It might. Play around with the values and edit your post with your findings. I am unable to help, but if you edit, you should get more eyes on your question. – Cfinley – 2015-05-22T20:13:13.237
@Jonathan "Pages/sec" does not only show pagefile access. This counter includes paging to all files, including exe's, dll's, and memory-mapped data files. You will see a nonzero value in this counter even if you disable the pagefile. It might even get larger. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2015-08-01T00:58:07.783
It turned out that the service was generating too many network traffic, after we optimized the code, the page file usage problem also disappeared. – Jonathan – 2015-08-03T15:52:06.063