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Excessive Page Faults?

Zyle
Zyle
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From what I have read page faults aren't necessarily a terrible thing, but with the 64bit client why am I seeing such a high rate? If I'm not mistaken isn't that indicative of low RAM? I have 16GB, eso64 doesn't seem to want to surpass 3GB of usage (odd for a 64bit), my total usage while I'm watching the client is 5/16GB..? I'm talking 20k-50k page faults per second. It's the only 64bit program that I have that I've seen get to the millions with just an average of 30min of gameplay.

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Zyle - LVL50 Stamina Nightblade - Former Emp AS - VMA Clear (Flawless)
Joven - LVL50 Hybrid Templar
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  • Aliniel
    Aliniel
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    My 64-bit client never goes beyond 2 GB. I have 12 GB total.
  • KhajitFurTrader
    KhajitFurTrader
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    Zyle wrote: »
    From what I have read page faults aren't necessarily a terrible thing,
    Nope, they're not. They just indicate that the virtual memory (VM) system is transferring data from one physical source (mass storage, e.g. HDD) to another (e.g. RAM). This process is also called paging.

    Zyle wrote: »
    but with the 64bit client why am I seeing such a high rate?
    It's the very nature of Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs that the actual contents of the viewport, i.e. the visible portion of the game that needs to be rendered, are mostly undetermined, because for all intents and purposes the movements of player characters are random. So is character shape, looks, gear, etc. Any MMO therefore needs to constantly stream graphical data (textures, meshes, etc.) from HDD to RAM to video RAM in the background, hence the high number of page faults as the VM is doing its thing.

    Zyle wrote: »
    If I'm not mistaken isn't that indicative of low RAM?
    Nope, you are. Paging is normal and state of the art in every modern operating system. There is, however, a degrading condition of paging called thrashing. If the system continually burns more CPU cycles on swapping memory pages in and out than doing actual work, i.e. executing programs, overall system performance tanks. This is a bad thing, which needs to be avoided by sensible program design. Thrashing may occur when physical RAM resources get low, but programs still ask for more memory to load more data. One programming paradigm to avoid this is to keep the working set of data, and therefore the amount of swapped-in memory pages, as small as possible, restricting it to what is actually needed at any given time. Being a memory hog, or having runaway memory leaks, simply is bad form for any program -- with the sole exception of enterprise-level databases (RDBMS).

    There is another aspect why programs shouldn't try to grab as much memory as possible to fill up most of physical RAM: buffering. Every modern operating system uses unallocated RAM as dynamic read/write buffers for its mass storage devices, as they have much slower access times than RAM -- by factors of several hundreds (SDDs) to thousands (HDD). This is why thrashing is such a bad thing: if memory pages need to be written out at a time when unallocated RAM is low, and buffering is long gone anyway, it will take ages from the CPU's point of view.

    Zyle wrote: »
    I have 16GB, eso64 doesn't seem to want to surpass 3GB of usage (odd for a 64bit), my total usage while I'm watching the client is 5/16GB..? I'm talking 20k-50k page faults per second. It's the only 64bit program that I have that I've seen get to the millions with just an average of 30min of gameplay.
    What you're seeing is the implication of everything that is mentioned above. On my Mac with 32 GB RAM equipped, the ESO client uses 5-7 GB tops (Ultra-High graphics quality setting, 2560x1440 resolution). Which sounds about right.

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