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Windows XP paging [duplicate]

Windows XP paging [duplicate]

I'm sitting at my computer right now with a couple of applications open. I have several hundred megs of RAM free and I recently rebooted. Even so, many applications are continuously writing to the page file (at least, the "page fault" counter keeps increasing in Task Manager).

Asked by: Guest | Views: 292
Total answers/comments: 2
Guest [Entry]

"You should read Mark's excellent writing on Paging at
Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory and related posts.
Very shortly: the pagefile system is not used as an overflow space for your RAM."
Guest [Entry]

"From Page fault in wikipedia:

Hardware generates a page fault for
page accesses where:


the page corresponding to the requested address is not loaded in
memory.
the page corresponding to the memory address accessed is loaded, but
its present status is not updated in
hardware.


This means that one of the applications is busily loading data or code into memory through reference, as distinct from I/O disk operations.

Since you have oodles of free memory, this can't be program/data swap-in or out to the pagefile.

The only other explanation I can think of is that some program has created a Memory-mapped file and is now processing it. This operation maps a memory portion equal in size to the file, although the file stays on the disk until the program refers to this ""memory"" through a pointer.

Question: which program in task manager is generating all these page faults?"