- Conor calls you because his computer starts to slow down about 30 minutes after he logs on. He tells you that he can hear a grinding noise coming from the computer. You want to determine if the noise is related to insufficient physical memory. Which Memory performance counter should Conor monitor?
Page faults/sec. A page fault occurs whenever the operating system accesses the hard disk for contents that could not be stored in physical memory. The space on the hard disk that stores the contents is referred to as virtual memory. By having Conor monitor the rate at which page faults occur, you can determine whether the grinding noise, which is likely coming from the hard drive, is related to insufficient memory. When the page fault increases to about 5 per second, there is likely a memory bottleneck.
