paging file

[Larry Waibel]

I'm running on a system with a DiskOnChip and believe I have the setting for
the paging file turned off. But if I run 'taskmgr', it shows a 'PF Usage' of
34MB and shows 4232K of kernel memory as 'paged'. Is this just an incorrect
indication from taskmgr in a system with no paging?

 

[Doug Gordon]

I'm not sure about the internals of XP, but many (most) systems that support
virtual memory use the paging support to load software modules even though
there is no paging file as such. When a process is started, the pages are
mapped to virtual memory space and are set as being not in memory. So as
soon as an instruction is executed for one of the process's pages, it
generates a page fault and the paging system reacts normally by reading the
pages into RAM from the executable file on the disk.

The difference is that, with no page file, it is not possible for the system
to write modified pages out to the page file to make room for something that
has to be paged into memory.

Doug G

 

[Larry Waibel]

Yeah, that makes sense (and I'm pretty sure XP does work along the lines you
describe); thanks! I was just seeing it called the 'page file usage' and
wasn't sure if that meant a real 'file'.