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More => Old Versions => Media Center 11 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: dragyn on April 03, 2003, 03:44:29 pm

Title: What is a page fault?
Post by: dragyn on April 03, 2003, 03:44:29 pm

I noticed this in the task manager. It's showing MC having 787,728 page faults. I don't think this is a good thing.  :(

Title: Re: What is a page fault?
Post by: dragyn on April 03, 2003, 03:50:37 pm

I think it has something to do with thumbnails. If I view a lot, it skyrockets. I'm over a million now.

Title: Re: What is a page fault?
Post by: JimH on April 03, 2003, 03:53:03 pm

Dave,
I think you're on to something.

Jim

Title: Re: What is a page fault?
Post by: John Gateley on April 03, 2003, 08:01:28 pm

A program has a virtual address space that is mapped onto the real memory available. Since multiple programs run on the same system, and since programs can be quite large, the virtual address space is not guaranteed to be in real memory all the time. The overflow is on the disk (in the swap space).

A page fault occurs when a running program references virtual memory that is not in real memory. Then the OS has to choose a page in real memory to write out to disk, and read in the page needed.

It's normal, though you may notice when using a busy system and a program with a lot of data that the disk is very busy (swapping in and out pages of memory).

j

Title: Re: What is a page fault?
Post by: dragyn on April 04, 2003, 01:18:55 am

ok. thanks.

I left MC running overnight. holy cow...25,000,000+ page faults. There definately is a problem here.

Title: Re: What is a page fault?
Post by: KingSparta on April 04, 2003, 01:38:40 am

Need more memory?

Title: Re: What is a page fault?
Post by: Matt on April 04, 2003, 04:57:36 am

There's a lot of paging in and out because of how MC cleans up it's memory space once in a while to help performance.

I don't think there's anything to worry about.

Title: Re: What is a page fault?
Post by: dragyn on April 06, 2003, 08:59:37 am

If you're not worried about it, then I'm not gonna worry about it.

It just seemed kinda odd that MC was in the millions while other programs were in the thousands if that. But like you said, it's using memory a lot more while other programs mainly sit there and do nothing.