Are too many page faults bad? Razer synapse at 1 billion per day

[Just Another Guy]

I just added the column in task manager out of curiosity, and was quite surprised to find the top value at 3,750,000,000 for razer synapse
I put the numbers into a calculator and found it's generating about 12000 per second, bear in mind this is over an average of 3 days, which seems like an awful lot. However, this only happens about every 4 seconds or so, so it's not a constant stream, just a whole load at once.

So, is this really bad or just a bit bad? What noticeable effects will it actually have, like heating up the ram or slowing down other programs access to it?

 

[Pinhedd]

That indicates a terribly written program

 

[Just Another Guy]

I figured that much lol, will it be having any effect on me though?

 

[Pinhedd]

I figured that much lol, will it be having any effect on me though?

Maybe. It's unlikely that it's generating 12,000 page faults per second at a sustained rate. It's more likely that it experienced a large number of page faults over a short period of time. I don't use the software myself so I have no idea what it does or what could possibly trigger that many faults.

Page faults are undesirable, but they are also unavoidable. A page fault occurs when a process references a virtual memory address that is not presently mapped into the physical address space. This typically occurs when a resource such as a file has been mapped into the process's virtual address space and hasn't yet been loaded into the physical address space, or when infrequently used virtual memory is ejected from physical memory and written to a backing store (called a swap file, or page file). Each page fault incurs a delay and often results in a hard disk access; excessive page faults can cause irritating hard disk thrashing.

If a seemingly simple program is generating a large number of page faults, it's probably not very well optimized. Larger or more complex programs can of course be excused, as well as those that are very IO-driven (such as antimalware software and Steam) but I've seen a lot of programs that simply have no excuse for poor memory management.