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Excessive WinXP pagefile use

Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 9:02 am
by mahobbs
Hi.
I'm running Windows XP Home (fully patched) and using Audacity (latest 1.3 Beta) for basic MP3 editing, nothing really complex. Great tool by the way.

I have noticed however that Audacity causes very large numbers of page faults when performing some tasks. To give you an example:

I import a 34 minute MP3 file (224kbit) and then perform a "normalize" on the whole imported file.

If I look at Windows task manager I see:
- Mem usage approx 30M
- VM Size approx 28M
- Paged pool approx 60K

During the normalize, which takes about a minute and a half, I see a regular Page Fault Delta (1 second refresh) of 7000 to 8000. I know that pagefaults are perfectly normal on a Windows system but these levels do appear to be very high on a machine where there is still physical memory available. Whilst this might not be a bug or actual fault I can't help thinking that there is some potential to improve overall performace if it were possible to reduce the pf levels.

By comparison, exporting the whole file to MP3 causes PF delta to run between about 300 and 600.

Regards,
Mark.

Re: Excessive WinXP pagefile use

Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 10:51 am
by waxcylinder
Yes indeed, and this has been discussed before - see: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... lt+#p90966

WC

Re: Excessive WinXP pagefile use

Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 3:40 pm
by mahobbs
Hi WC.
Thanks, I had seen the related link which is why I posted mine to add to the evidence that there could well be room for improvement here. I am sure moderate page fault levels are perfectly fine but I really don't believe what I am seeing is moderate.

Cheers.

Re: Excessive WinXP pagefile use

Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 4:41 pm
by waxcylinder
mahobbs,

I have added a link back to this thread from the other related thread.

Thanks,
WC