Tony Cappellini wrote: > > While monitoring The task manager/Performance Tab > > It seems as though Windows XP is almost always paging, even when all > of available memory > is not being used. > > This doesn't make sense and seems to be wasteful. Why should the OS be > wasting time paging, when it doesn't need to (aka when all of > available physical ram has not been used)?
What leads you to believe it is paging? All pageable memory is "backed" by pages in the page file as soon as it is allocated, even though it hasn't been copied there yet. The "PF Usage" page in Task Manager shows how much of the page file is committed, so it includes memory that is currently in use, even if it those pages haven't really been written to disk yet. The Windows paging subsystem is one of the most highly tuned parts of the operating system; it generally behaves pretty sensibly. Also, a certain percentage of physical memory is reserved for "non-paged pool" in the kernel, which is used by drivers for critical buffers and for DMA, among other things. Thus, you can be out of "paged pool" even when there is unused physical memory remaining. Virtual memory is a surprisingly difficult thing to nail down. -- Tim Roberts, t...@probo.com Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. _______________________________________________ python-win32 mailing list python-win32@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-win32
