myself said:
A page file being used basically means that the system is using hard drive
to supliment memory right? I have a system with 2 gigs of ram and i never
use over 1.2 at any time so why is my pagefile usage almost as high as my
memory usage?
Most if not all of that will be "phantom" usage, where Windows is
using the address space in the pagefile to satisfy the unused portions
of memory allocation requests.
Almost everything - Windows components, application programs, device
drivers, etc - asks for memory allocations that are larger than what
they usually need under normal circumstances. By design Windows must
allocate memory address space to satisfy the full amount of all memory
allocation requests that are issued, but allocating RAM to unused,
excessive portions of these requests would be wasteful. So what
Windows does is to allocate RAM only to those portions of the request
that are actually used and maps the unused portions to locations in
the pagefile. Note that this mapping of unused portions to the
pagefile does not require any actual hard disk activity - all that is
required is to make entries in the memory mapping table maintained by
the CPU.
To see the actual pagefile usage you can use a utility written by MVP
Bill James. It is available from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/
Hope this explains the situation
Good luck
Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca
"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."
