Will said:
When View of Page Faults is selected in Task Manager Processes, I am
seeing 2 page faults per second for explorer.exe and at this moment,
4000 per second for iexplorer.exe. This is true whether using default
page file or none. Am wondering if anything is wrong or can be done
about this anomaly?
Page faults aren't necessarily, not even usually, bad. Go to Wikipedia.com
to read more but here's an excerpt:
Page faults are not fatal
Contrary to what their name might suggest, page faults are not necessarily
fatal and are common and necessary to increase the amount of memory
available to programs in any operating system that utilizes virtual memory,
including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
[edit] Reasons for page fault
Hardware generates a page fault for page accesses where:
a.. the page corresponding to the requested address is not loaded in
memory.
b.. the page corresponding to the memory address accessed is loaded, but
its present status is not updated in hardware.
The closely related exception known as the protection fault is generated for
page accesses where:
a.. the page is not part of the program, and so is not mapped in program
memory.
b.. the program does not have sufficient privileges to read or write the
page.
c.. the page access is legal, but it is mapped with demand paging.
Protection fault can also be generated for many other invalid accesses not
related to paging.
On the x86 architecture, accesses to pages that are not present and accesses
to pages that do not conform to the permission attributes for a given page
(protection faults as described above) are both reported via the page fault
processor exception. Internally, the processor hardware provides information
to the page fault handler that indicates what sort of access triggered the
fault, so that these scenarios may be differentiated from the perspective of
the operating system. The usage of the term protection fault (when speaking
in relation to page faults) is thus not to be confused with the general
protection fault exception, which is used to signal segmentation-based
memory access violations, as well as a variety of other general protection
related violations (such as the use of an instruction that is not valid at
the current privilege level).
Regards,
Pop`
