I see a lot page faults on my system even though there appear to be plenty of Available Bytes. What is going on?
You are probably looking at the Page Faults/sec Counter and interpreting it as the rate of demand paging. Not entirely. In Windows NT and 2000, the Page Faults/sec counter includes both hard and soft page faults. (It also appears to include Cache faults/sec, which are application-related file cache read misses.) Instead of using the Page Faults/sec counter as an indicator of demand paging, you should rely on the Page Reads/sec Counter instead in both Windows NT and 2000. Page Reads/sec corresponds to the rate of hard page faults that specifically require a disk access to resolve. There are two types of so-called soft faults in Windows 2000 that are included in the Page Faults/sec metric: Transition Faults/sec and Demand Zero Faults/sec. High rates of both types of soft faults are common even where there is an ample supply of RAM. Transition faults are a by-product of the Window 2000 page replacement policy and cannot easily be avoided. To determine which pages of a process address spac
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