How many hard faults is acceptable in Vista/Windows 7?

[Kurtiskain]

Hi guys

Just a quick q. I was looking through my task manager today, went to go look at my memory usage in the resource monitor...and was shocked to see 30-40 Hard Faults a second with 78% of 2GB RAM used.
(I was running ConvertXtoDVD and Adobe Premiere Pro CS3)

I know that Hard Faults do not mean the RAM is bad, (usually) is it possible at all that it could be though? It is only a few months old.

Kurt

[BC_Programmer]

a "hard  fault" IIRC merely means that while accessing a page of virtual memory it had to hit the disk. If it's any consolation my firefox.exe process is currently sitting at just over 8 million hard faults, and explorer is at just over 1 million.

[Kurtiskain]

Ah ok so just to confirm, it would never mean you RAM was bad?

I mean I don't get any bluescreens or anything, so go figure

[BC_Programmer]

Ah ok so just to confirm, it would never mean you RAM was bad?

I mean I don't get any bluescreens or anything, so go figure

No- just as a "Page Fault" isn't usually bad because the Virtual Memory Manager just scoops up the data from the swap.

Those familar with Windows 9x may remember the "Illegal Operation" dialog, this usually resulted from a page fault, when a program accesses memory outside it's address space- usually by trying to dereference a null (0) pointer.


If you get a lot of "this program has encountered a problem..." type crashes then that could mean bad RAM. Hard faults are not really a "bad" thing per se.

and now my Firefox.exe has over 9 million page faults in task manager... 

[Laska]

Well, Now I know why I was having so many crashes before I maxed the RAM at 4 Gig