XP paging question

Does anyone know what in the world XP keeps in 141M of paging file when I have 3G of memory not even half filled?

I sped the sys way up by fooling XP; I allocated a 1G ramdisk and use it as a paging file. (You REALLY ought to try it.) Still, some instructions, somewhere --lots of them it seems -- are doing unnecessary work to get data from the ramdisk "paging file" that they could just as easily fetch directly in a single memory cycle by keeping their stuff in ordinary memory. When they use paging unnecessarily, XP has to:

-- handle a page fault

-- decode multilevel page tables for the address of the "page" on the pseudo-disk

-- execute god-knows-how-many ramdisk driver instructions to fill the "read page" request

--- worst of all, when they pull the data from the pagefile (on a ram drive), they must physically move the data to another place in memory when it "swaps in" the page

-- and presumably, they read the data AGAIN from memory into the CPU from the swapped-in "page"

Reading about it on the web, it seems that people believe MS is swapping out unused code, like initialization code for a program that's been running for an hour.

That sounds good, but TaskInfo reports 1,842 page faults and 655K of paging file page data read/written PER SECOND.

MS is greedy as hëll, but they've never been manifestly stupid. Surely there must be a reason for this.

Anyone know why?

-- doesn't-understand-stuff david

____________________________
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 6400+ unlocked 'n overclocked to 3.6 GHz
ZAP: CPU 1.6v Mem 2.25v (oww!) But check this out:
TEMP: Idle 16 Both cores under max load: 41 (that's right!)
THE MAGIC: Thermoelectrically cooled below ambient
SWAP FILE: 1G ram drive (try it before commenting)
FSB: 225
HYPERTRANSPORT: 1,125 GHz
MEMORY: 4G Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC2-6400 DDR2 at CL5
SYS: Asus M2N32 & Geforce 8800 GTS 512 & XP/64
CASE: None. Mounted on a wood table for cooling and so I can hack with it
HEY: Get a Freezone thermoelectric CPU Cooler; it's amazing!

 

An interesting link at a MS Forum. I must read it more fully as I have 1 gig of never used RAM on my XP Pro laptop.

http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t12014.html

Also search using Optimize the Paging File. Hope this helps. Bazza