Question : Excessive paging and perfmon showing pages/sec peaking at 2400

Hi,

We have a Power Edge 1850 with 3GB Ram running Windows 2003 server (32 bit), running as a DC and also home to a postscript generating application called XPP (A high throughput batch and interactive composition system that turns XML content into high-quality composed and paginated Postscript or PDF output.) along with a few other applications.

We have just had a VRA run on our servers and the report says that this server is not a good candidate for Virtualisation due to "excessive paging".

My understanding on the subject starts to get very very woolly around about now so I would like some advice from the experts on what I can do.
Is there much point in adding more Ram as the limit (afaik) for 32 bit is 4GB and would upping it from 3GB to 4GB make much of a difference?

Looking at Perfmon and the pages/sec counter and I see it sitting with an average of 260 and peaking every now and again at over 2400. How can I dig deeper and find out which application is causing this and how I can improve on the situation and is this a good indication of there being a problem or am I looking at the wrong results?

What can I do to reduce the excessive paging?

many thanks.

Answer : Excessive paging and perfmon showing pages/sec peaking at 2400

Letterpart,
to improve pagefile function and performance, you must set the pagefile to a fixed size, i.e., do not allow Windows to manage its size by downsizing and upsizing it, back and forth, all the time.

As rule of thumb, a pagefile size of 1 to 2 times the physicial RAM of the computer is advised, e.g., 3 GB of fixed size pagefile  for a 2 GB RAM machine.

You can find many useful information about pagefile optimizing under http://smallvoid.com/article/windows-page-file.html .

Under a 32-bit environment, your RAM limit is 3 GB, and you will surely feel a performance improvement when raising memory from 2 to 3 GB.

Best regards,
Robofix