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Questionwhat really is partition Pin
Anonymous22-Jul-05 7:32
Anonymous22-Jul-05 7:32 
AnswerRe: what really is partition Pin
Roger Wright22-Jul-05 8:21
professionalRoger Wright22-Jul-05 8:21 
GeneralTerminal services security via browser Pin
jonathan1522-Jul-05 3:44
jonathan1522-Jul-05 3:44 
GeneralHistory of URLs in Internet Explorer Pin
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar22-Jul-05 3:13
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar22-Jul-05 3:13 
GeneralRe: History of URLs in Internet Explorer Pin
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar22-Jul-05 3:14
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar22-Jul-05 3:14 
GeneralRe: History of URLs in Internet Explorer Pin
Michael Dunn22-Jul-05 5:45
sitebuilderMichael Dunn22-Jul-05 5:45 
GeneralAvailable MBytes - perfmon Pin
devvvy21-Jul-05 22:13
devvvy21-Jul-05 22:13 
GeneralRe: Available MBytes - perfmon Pin
Mike Dimmick25-Jul-05 3:27
Mike Dimmick25-Jul-05 3:27 
That's a bit of a tough one, actually. 'Available MBytes' is the sum of physical memory pages that are free, those that have been zeroed, and those on the Standby and Modified lists.

This needs a bit of explaining. The difference between the four lists is in how much effort the OS needs to go to in order to give that memory to something that needs it (either a process, or some system component).

For security reasons, when a user-mode process allocates a page, the page is filled with 0s (otherwise the previous contents would be visible to the process, possibly disclosing sensitive information). To ensure that it can quickly satisfy the demand for 0 pages, there's a thread (the 'zero page thread') which simply writes zeros to free pages, moving them from the Free list to the Zero Page list. This thread runs in the context of the System Idle Process, and has a priority below everything else, and is never boosted (thread priorities are normally boosted if a thread hasn't run for a long time because higher priority threads are using all the CPU time). In effect, it only runs when the system is otherwise idle.

The Free list is used for allocations when a zero page is not required. This covers system allocations, and also user-mode allocations for memory-mapped files, where the data will be loaded from the file when the program reads the page.

If the Free list is exhausted the OS then tries the Standby list, and if that is exhausted it can try the Modified list. If it must take a page from the Modified list it first has to write the page back to disk, for the Modified list contains pages which have been changed since last written (or changed at all if never written).

That covers allocation but not how these lists fill up again. If a process or component stops using a page completely (uses VirtualFree), it returns to the Free list. More commonly though, pages are removed through working set trimming. The working set is the set of pages that the process or component has used recently. Each process has its own working set, and there's one system working set. The system working set consists of pages used by the system cache, and by pageable code and data in the kernel and drivers, and by paged pool (small data blocks used by the kernel and drivers). Periodically, and when there's memory pressure (signalled by low numbers of pages on the various lists), a system thread wakes up which trims the working sets - places pages that have not been used in a while on one of the Standby or Modified lists. If the page has been written to, it goes on the Modified list. Otherwise it goes on the Standby list.

Periodically, another thread wakes up, which writes a number of pages on the Modified list back to the disk. It tries to do this so that the pages it writes are close together, to reduce the number of I/O operations required.

You may be wondering what the point of these intermediate lists is. The point is that, if the data is still in memory, and the original working set tries to reference them, the OS just gives the page with the existing data on it back to the previous owner. This is referred to as a soft fault, but it's still counted as a page fault. When the page is moved from the Standby to the Free list, or allocated to another working set, the original working set has to be updated to indicate that the page is no longer available. These operations show up in the "Transition Faults/sec" counter.

Windows counts the Standby and Modified lists as 'Available', but it also counts them as 'System Cache'. I suppose they are cached, in a way, because the OS doesn't need to go back to the disk for the data. On this machine, I often see the sum of Available and System Cache exceed the physical memory fitted: right now Available is 510MB and System Cache is 590MB, and there's only 1GB fitted.

Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
GeneralMigrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Roger Wright21-Jul-05 16:00
professionalRoger Wright21-Jul-05 16:00 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Anders Molin24-Jul-05 8:49
professionalAnders Molin24-Jul-05 8:49 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Roger Wright24-Jul-05 9:27
professionalRoger Wright24-Jul-05 9:27 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Andy Brummer24-Jul-05 9:30
sitebuilderAndy Brummer24-Jul-05 9:30 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Roger Wright24-Jul-05 10:00
professionalRoger Wright24-Jul-05 10:00 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Andy Brummer24-Jul-05 11:17
sitebuilderAndy Brummer24-Jul-05 11:17 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Roger Wright24-Jul-05 13:46
professionalRoger Wright24-Jul-05 13:46 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Andy Brummer24-Jul-05 15:47
sitebuilderAndy Brummer24-Jul-05 15:47 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Dan Neely25-Jul-05 7:11
Dan Neely25-Jul-05 7:11 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
John M. Drescher3-Aug-05 6:54
John M. Drescher3-Aug-05 6:54 
GeneralRe: Migrating to Windows Server 2003 Pin
Graham Bradshaw24-Jul-05 10:44
Graham Bradshaw24-Jul-05 10:44 
Generalsearch for files and folders Pin
Tibor Blazko21-Jul-05 3:21
Tibor Blazko21-Jul-05 3:21 
GeneralRe: search for files and folders Pin
Mekong River21-Jul-05 5:27
Mekong River21-Jul-05 5:27 
GeneralRe: search for files and folders Pin
Tibor Blazko21-Jul-05 19:38
Tibor Blazko21-Jul-05 19:38 
GeneralRe: search for files and folders Pin
Mekong River22-Jul-05 6:21
Mekong River22-Jul-05 6:21 
GeneralRe: search for files and folders Pin
Tibor Blazko22-Jul-05 6:25
Tibor Blazko22-Jul-05 6:25 
QuestionHow to control printer Pin
Mekong River20-Jul-05 21:40
Mekong River20-Jul-05 21:40 

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