Do you complain that your PC or workstation is running very slow than expected? Do you hear the complaint from your friends like “It was very fast when I bought it. Now it is crawling…” Let me tell you, the PF (Page File) usage shown in your Task Manager is the villain in most of the cases.
Why a higher PF usage is bad: Well, windows uses a concept called Virtual memory (for the folks who are not that aware of the gears inside your operating system), it means that, the applications you run in your PC, in total, may require more memory than the available physical memory or RAM. Your hard disk (HDD) is the place where the applications are stored but they cannot run directly from HDD as the speed of HDD is much slower compared to the speed at which the CPU needs to access them. So we put the programs in to RAM which is thousands of times faster than the HDD and then the CPU takes it from there. The intermediate results and all that your application produces are also stored in RAM. So the amount of RAM that you have in your machine limits the size of the application or number of applications that you can run simultaneously. To overcome this limit, Windows uses virtual memory, in which a portion of HDD is treated as RAM, as required. So applications that are in RAM and which are not used at present are moved out to this HDD area and the freed RAM memory is given for applications that are currently executed and that require more memory. When the old application is needed again by CPU, it will be moved back to RAM again and then executed. So, the not so used applications are moved out of RAM to HDD (swap out) and currently required applications are moved in to RAM from HDD (swap in). This swapping process is not carried out at the level of applications but as pages (which is a memory management stuff you need not know). This swapping increases the flexibility in terms of the number of applications you can run simultaneously but causes performance decay due to increased use of low speed memory such as HDD. The PF usage indicates the amount of virtual memory in use. The higher the PF Usage, higher the involvement of low speed HDD and slower the over all performance of your machine. Hence, it is bad.
When you buy a computer, it may have only the necessary application installed in it. But over time, people have the tendency to try out new ‘looks like useful’ applications and they forget the fact that these applications, if not uninstalled, may clog up memory without giving any kind of productivity. Over time, you may experience a slower performance of your PC due to this. People say “let us format it and things will be fine”. But they do the same things again and this cycle continues. In cases of work stations, your network administrators and some corporate policies may worsen the situation.
For example, my office machine is a rather old one and has only 512MB of RAM in it. And my organization relies on a dozen of security and software maintenance tools. It constitutes of antivirus/antimalware tools, network monitoring tools, corporate news delivery tools, etc… I agree that the malware protection tools are a must in any organization. But what if these tools become too memory clogging that I am not able to do my normal designated work on the machine properly. All I am doing is sitting in front of a very secure machine, not able to run my development environment (IDE) properly. The security tools use up most of the memory and my IDE tool gets not enough. As a result, when I start running the IDE, the Page File usage shoots up and the machine starts to crawl. In short, the productivity is at stake. So sometimes, what I do is, I kill the ‘not that necessary’ tools and free up some memory and then run the IDE. This is not a good practice but some times we have to consider priorities.
Look at how it looks like when the machine is booted.
Here, I cleaned some mess and freed some memory for my work.
There are exceptions like, when some programs use up the entire CPU time. I remember a bug that I found with the Adobe Updater program, that when launched by a scheduler, used to consume the whole CPU time, shooting CPU usage to 100%. The computer literally hangs, and even stops responding to mouse clicks. If you are lucky enough, you may be able to kill the process and bring your PC back to normal state. I remember, many of my colleagues used to complain about their PC, not knowing that it is adobe’s updater that is slowing down their machines. When I was called for help, I used to simply kill the process and WOW, in a second, their PC is as fast as it was before (of course I used to work with people who didn’t know how to kill a process which is eating up the computing resources 
).
So what are the possible solutions for the problem? Well there are two different approaches I can suggest…
- Reduce PF usage by disabling unwanted processes/ applications: This is recommended in case of your PCs but not in case of office machines. May be you can have a talk with your network administrator and see how to minimize/fine tune the applications running on your work station.
- Use some speedy secondary storage device: SSDs can really help. A bit expensive but the best solution in case of PCs and not that practical in case of office machines. I don’t think that your organization will be ready to pay for expensive SSDs to boost the performance of your work stations. Check this video to get an idea of how good SSDs are in making your PC lightening fast.
I suggest a combination of these two as applicable.
Below is the list of Windows processes you will need to run Windows XP smoothly (taskmgr.exe is not required). The rest you may end (if you have necessary privileges) for a faster user experience. The memory utilization can drop down to ~ 120MB and windows XP can run smooth on a machine with 256MB RAM.
Tags: Memory leak, Operating System, Performance
would have been more useful if you had listed all the programs we can switch off in vista and a separate section for xp – some might make the pc not work on the net but that is ok at times like when playing a game locally.
Beautiful and very informative blog specially for people like me who are not from the CS/IT background but are regular computer users. This article helped me to speed-up my system performance.Thank you Faiz!
It appears that the author, like so many others, does not really understand what “PF Usage” actually means. This is NOT actual pagefile usage at all. It is potential pagefile usage. If absolutely everything that is in RAM that could be paged out to the pagefile actually was, this is the space that would be required. In most cases actual pagefile usage will be much lower.
You may have noticed that the “Commit Charge” is very similar to “PF Usage”. This is no coincidence, they are showing the same thing, just in different units. There is nothing in Task Manager that will show actual pagefile usage.
Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA
I do agree that the PF usage is actually Commit Charge. But I do not agree to the argument that actual page file usage will be much lower than (exponentially) the Commit Charge because this can happen only if all running applications request large amount of memory without using them. And I was trying to explain things to people who are not techies, how to speed up their machine freeing some memory…
And Larry, your answer is very similar to what I saw here [http://blogs.msdn.com/varund/archive/2009/09/04/understanding-and-troubleshooting-win2003-pf-usage-on-the-server-running-sql-server-2000.aspx]. Are you guys working in the same team or something?
cant ‘back to my computer from hard disk drive