An Overview of Troubleshooting Memory Issues - Part Two

Part II of Troubleshooting Memory Issues

K. Brian Kelley - Databases, Infrastructure, and Security — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:06:00 GMT

The Windows Server Performance Team has published part 2 of troubleshooting memory issues . This one

Um overview sobre troubleshootings relacionados a memória - Parte II

Blog do Anderson Thiago - Aka Anderson T — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:15:51 GMT

Segue em seguida a continuidade do overview sobre troubleshootings de memórias apresentado por CC Hameed

re: An Overview of Troubleshooting Memory Issues - Part Two

Bryan — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:57:24 GMT

Picking up on your comments about soft page faults, I wonder if you've seen that memory allocation can cause >100,000 soft faults per second, which can really slow a system down.

The issue occurs if a program is allocating and deallocating over 1MB of memory, then the heap manager will return this memory to the free list and so Windows will zero it out in the kernel next time you use it, on a page-by-page basis.

This could be considered an application problem rather than a Windows problem, though personally I feel Windows should allow the limit to be adjusted.

re: An Overview of Troubleshooting Memory Issues - Part Two

Eric — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:20:36 GMT

Bryan,

I am seeing the same thing with soft page faults. I am glad to see someone else has noticed this problem. It will consume about 25-50% of the cpu time (as seen by the kernel time plotted in Task Manager). This is definitely a problem with the OS as far as I am concerned.

I will get up to 200,000 soft page faults per second in a test case I put together today. Just because I am malloc/free'ing memory for intermediate results. The other way one can see this occuring is by noticing the constantly adjusting working set size displayed in Task Manager while the Maximum Memory sizes never change. The OS is doing a lot of work and consuming a lot of resources in order to get in my way.

We are trying to use a Windows system for some performance computations. This is causing us to not meet the systems full potential.

Do you know if there are any settings to make the OS a little lazier on my behalf?