Memory Usage and Allocation

   

Memory capacity becomes a problem when all of the processes running on the Windows NT server (including Windows NT itself) need more code or data pages than provided for by physical memory in the computer. At that point, the operating system temporarily stores some memory pages on the local disk in order to make more memory available for the next service. As memory contention increases, the system eventually reaches a point where the paging activity (which is using system resources such as CPU cycles, bus bandwidth, and disk access time) is using more resources than the actual work. This is often called "thrashing."

Thrashing can be viewed as a contention for memory. As with most resources, some contention is tolerable. However, as memory contention increases, response times typically increase exponentially.

If memory is a performance bottleneck, you can:

Note   You can easily monitor memory use by using the Windows NT Performance Monitor. For more information, see Using Performance Monitor in this chapter.