Page Writes Alarm
This alarm is activated when the number of pages being written to disk exceeds a threshold. Sustained high paging rates can adversely effect the performance of a system.
Only those pages that have been altered are written to disk. Pages that have not been changed are dropped.
When this alarm is current, you should:
- Look at the Processes page on the Processes drilldown to see which process is causing the paging. Look at the Page Faults/Second column to determine the cause of paging. A high level of page faults and page outs indicates memory thrashing. If this is the case, the system may require more memory.
- View the Paging chart on the Summary page of the Memory drilldown. This shows how long the high paging has been occurring. Short periods of high paging are acceptable, but if the paging rate is high for a sustained period, there may be a problem with the system.
- Consider adding more physical memory to the system.
- Stop unnecessary services and processes on the system.
Related Topics
Processes Page
Summary Page
Paging File Alarm
This alarm is activated when the utilization of the paging file exceeds a threshold.
When this alarm is active you should:
- Look at the Processes page of the Processes drilldown. Look at the Virtual MB column to see which applications are using the most virtual memory.
- Some applications (such as Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SQL Server) can have their memory utilization limited.
- Close any superfluous processes.
- Look at increasing the size of the page file.
- Look at increasing the amount of RAM in the machine.
Related Topics
Processes Page
Paging File Disk Location Alarm
This alarm becomes active when there is more than one paging file on a single physical disk.
This can cause performance degradation – especially on IDE disks. IDE disks allow only a single disk operation to be active on the bus at any time.
To rectify this:
- Open the Windows Control Panel.
- Open the System control panel.
- Click the Advanced tab.
- Choose Performance Settings, and change the paging file allocations.
Percentage Bandwidth Alarm
The total network bandwidth capacity of the specified network card is nearing the limit where it is saturating the network link. If this is happening regularly, look at:
- The NBT page of the Network drilldown to see if any users or other systems are copying an inordinate level of data between systems.
- Moving network applications or shared files to another machine to balance the load.
- Upgrading the network subsystem to a faster technology.
- Adding an additional network card to the machine and configuring the system to utilize it.
Tip: If there are multiple network cards on the target system, use the Windows Network Card Display options in the Spotlight on Windows Options window to choose the one whose data you want to display.
Related Topics
NBT Page
Windows Network Card Display
