Page Faults

Chronicle · 25 Feb 2006 at 20:07

Is it usual to have this many page faults -

Winamp (while playing a song) keeps getting about 100-200 page faults a second...

NathanE · 25 Feb 2006 at 20:40

Any program that does a lot of file reading will generate a lot of page faults. Windows uses memory-mapped I/O...

A page fault is when a page of memory is stored on disk or in the page file and needs to be brought into physical memory to be used. It's perfectly normal.

You may be able to reduce their frequency in Winamp by increasing your buffers.

PinkPig · 25 Feb 2006 at 21:31

Loads of my applications have 70,000 or more looks like it's normal!

marc_howarth · 26 Feb 2006 at 00:12

PinkPig said:
Loads of my applications have 70,000 or more looks like it's normal!

is it not good if i have 9,781,508 page faults for SymWSC.exe then??

PinkPig · 26 Feb 2006 at 00:22

marc_howarth said:
is it not good if i have 9,781,508 page faults for SymWSC.exe then??

You're just seeing the word "fault" and worrying. It's not an error, it's just a windows operation. SymWSC is Symantec Security Center, so it's probably doing virus-scanning and so forth, it's not something a typical user is expected to look at or worry about!