Excesive Page/sec in a Server with 4 GIG Ram

[Francisco Victoria]

Hi,
I have 4/CPU server with 4GB RAM and with a SWAP file of
4GB. The server is running around 90% of CPU utilization
and when I check the performance log I found that 85% of
the total CPU utilization is being used for privilege
operations and the rest (15%) for user work.
I decided to check why the system was using so much
privilege cpu to attend a so small percentage of users
request. After checking page/sec counter I saw the
average pagee/sec was higher than 1200 pages/sec. I also
checked the pages fault/sec counter and was also very
high.
It seems, in my humble oppinion, that Windows is forcing
every process to go to the swap file even thoug there is
pleanty RAM available to hold all the process in RAM.
Then when the process is ready to execute windows is
generating a page faul and this is triggering the paging
I/O. This doesn't seems to be a bad thing when each
process run for quite a while but in my case the life
span of each process is very short. This is creating an
extra work because when the system initiates the same
process again and again is goes throught the same process
of the page faul again and again and again.
My question is if I can really eliminate the SWAP file
and force each process to go to real memory rather than
viritual memory?

I also check the SWAP file utilization and it was aroung
0.6 (60% I think) which indicates there is pleanty room
to have every one of this process in RAM.

Is anybody running Windows 2000 Adv. Server without swap
file? If yes. Have you experience any problem?

Thanks in advance for your support and sorry for the long
problem description.

Sincerelly,
Francisco Victoria

 

[Leon E. Webster, MCSE]

You need a pagefile for apps and memory dumps. You probably need to create
another pagefile on another disk/partition all by itself. Have you checked
fragmentation on the disk? Take a look at this article

http://www.microsoft.com/windows200.../techinfo/reskit/en-us/core/fnec_evl_wafw.asp

Lee