Monitoring page faults

From the Windows Performance Monitor select the Sybase IQ process as described above. Select the counter Page Faults/sec. This counter includes both the “soft” and “hard” page faults. Hard page faults are the page faults resulting in disk I/O. Soft page faults in general are not a performance issue.

To determine the number of hard page faults, select the object LogicalDisk and the instance of where the file pagefile.sys is located (this should be on a separate volume from the Sybase IQ database). Select the counter Disk Transfers/sec. This value when compared with the Page Faults/sec value will give an indication of the percentage of page faults that are hard page faults. Ideally there should be little to no I/O activity to the page file. In small memory configurations, however, paging is likely to occur.

Sustained hard page fault rates above 20 per second indicate that the physical memory of the machine has been overallocated.