Perofmance / Paging Question

[Bob]

I have a graphic application that runs rather slowly. When I look at
the performance stats, I see that it is encountering what appear to
be a large number of page faults:

Mem usage: 74K-K
VM Size 60K-K
Page Faults: 48K
I/O Reads: 11K
I/O Bytes 34M

The system has 384MB of physical Ram, and it has over 200mb available
at any given time. So, why all the paging ? Shouldn't this application
be able to keep itself in memory and avoid all the paging? Or is Win2K
paging measuring something other than what I think ? Is there any way
to tune the system to allow this application to take more memory ?
(I've fooled with priority already, that was not a good thing to do).

Thanks,

 

[David Adner]

These articles might be some help.

Invesstigating Disk Paging
http://www.microsoft.com/windows200.../techinfo/reskit/en-us/core/fnec_evl_qnjo.asp

Chapter 27 - Overview of Performance Monitoring
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch27.mspx

Chapter 28 - Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch28.mspx

 

[Bob]

These articles might be some help.

Invesstigating Disk Paging
http://www.microsoft.com/windows200.../techinfo/reskit/en-us/core/fnec_evl_qnjo.asp

Chapter 27 - Overview of Performance Monitoring
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch27.mspx

Chapter 28 - Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch28.mspx

Thanks. I'll do some reading. I hit 2 Million PF's after using the
application for an hour last night. Something is wrong with this
picture.

 

[Bob]

These articles might be some help.

Invesstigating Disk Paging
http://www.microsoft.com/windows200.../techinfo/reskit/en-us/core/fnec_evl_qnjo.asp

Chapter 27 - Overview of Performance Monitoring
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch27.mspx

Chapter 28 - Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../professional/reskit/en-us/part6/proch28.mspx

OK... did my reading and some research, I still have a couple of
questions.

Question 1: One of the documents says this "(File System) Cache
bottlenecks are of greatest concern to users of Windows 2000
Professional–based computers running computer-aided
design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) applications."
OK, that's me. But the document also says this: " Microsoft® Windows®
2000 Server provides a user interface for adjusting the size of the
file system cache, but this user interface is not available in Windows
2000 Professional."

Well, there's a nice twist i.e. "We know you'll have this
problem in Win2K Pro but we didn't put the tool to fix it in because
it helps us differentiate win2K server" :-( I have Win2K server
available but I'd prefer to keep these systems as Pro since they don't
need the other overhead or security issues. Is there any way to hack
the Win2K Server File System Cache adjustment tool onto Win2K Pro ?

Question 2: After reading these docs, I still don't see any reason I
should get so much paging when there is still 200mb of memory marked
as unused at all times. All of the responses for paging deal with
adding or conserving memory... that doesn't seem to be my problem,
it's just not using it. (?)

Question 3: Is there any way to cause an application to stick in
memory ? Maybe some sort of MS-DOS style RAMDRIVE I could use to
force the application into memory so that it always pages from
memory rather than from disk ?

Thanks,




For information about adjusting the file-system cache size on systems
running Windows 2000 Server, see "Evaluating Memory and Cache Usage"
in the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server Resource Kit Server Operations
Guide.