Description
This visualization shows how busy your computer’s memory paging process has been.
Your computer needs somewhere to keep information temporarily while it is working on things. This is called memory. It is different to the disk space where it mostly keeps things permanently.
This memory is a fixed size – if it fills up, the computer will usually work out the least used things in memory and store them out on disk while it does other things with the new free space. It brings them back into memory from disk when it has space or when it needs them to complete task for you. This process is called ‘paging’.
Memory is super fast but disk is relatively slow so the process of paging can really slow down your computer if it happens constantly.
Real-world impacts
If you are suffering from poor performance on your computer it could be because of external things like the network being slow or busy or it could be because of things on your computer being busy – high rates of memory paging to and from disk is one of these things.
High memory paging rates could result in slow application startup times or slow load times for spreadsheets and documents or it could result in the slow display of webpages.
High memory paging rates are a “slow down” issue – your computer is working but just taking too long to do things.
What to look for
In this visualization, a higher number means more memory paging.
There is nothing wrong with memory being used to full capacity and even doing a little paging to disk – in fact, we really want the memory to be heavily used otherwise we could have purchased a cheaper computer with less memory!
In fact, a zero memory paging number should be the exception. Very high memory paging rates for short periods is also okay.
What can cause a problem is high or very high memory paging rates utilisation all of the time.
How do we test
Most computers keep a measure of their memory paging – each type of computer (Windows, MaxOS, Linux etc) do it a little differently.
We read these measures periodically and ‘normalise’ them to make them report the same measure across different machine types.
We then extract the basic memory paging rate and report that.
What could cause High Memory Paging
At the basic level, too many things open, actively processing and needing more memory than is available can cause high memory paging rates.
That might be because you have a computer that does not have ‘enough’ memory and it is time to upgrade but don’t rush to that conclusion.
A computer that is a few years old and is only being asked to do a bit of email, web browsing and the occasional document or spreadsheet should be given the benefit of the doubt and not be immediately traded in for younger model!
It may be because you are asking your computer to keep an unreasonably large number of things open at the same time. Again, don’t assume that is the case because today’s computers are pretty capable machines.
It may be because just one of your applications is hogging the available memory, this could be because of a bug, it is poorly written or you are just using it in a way that it was not designed to be used.
And finally, of course, it may be that is it time to trade your old clunker for a more modern machine or at the very least investigate if you can add some more memory.
Spend some time figuring out which of these is the problem and you can save yourself a whole bunch of money.
Next steps to diagnose or repair for Residential Trial Customers
Firstly have a think about whether you feel your computer is running slow – just because the visualization shows your memory is being paged to disk does not mean your computer is slow.
If you feel the computer is ‘slow’ and the visualization shows your memory is not paging at the times slowness is experienced then look elsewhere – CPU or filesystem performance are worth a look. If it is slow when doing things that use the network, look at the network-based visualizations (Throughput, Loss, Latency, DNS etc) for performance issues.
If the slowness is not related to network activities take a look at the other computer platform related visualizations such as CPU and Filesystem performance.
If your computer is slow and the memory visualization looks like it is paging at high rates when you experience slowness then you will need to troubleshoot what is using the memory.
This can be a dark art but we can always make a start by opening up the available system performance application on your machine and see if a process is hogging the memory or if there are just too many things running or if your machine is just old and slow.
On Windows you can start with the Task Manager, on MacOS you can start with the Activity monitor and while linux machines have their GUI apps, the shell-based ‘top’ is a great resource.
Try shutting down memory-hogging applications while watching the memory utilisation on your machine and see if that helps narrow down the culprit.
Browsers are notorious for hogging memory when they have lots of website tabs open – try shutting down all of the tabs and then shutting down the browser while watching the memory utilisation on your machine.
Assuming you don’t have to buy a new machine and you find a culprit then use google or contact the application owner to see if they have a fix or a recommendation to stop it hogging things again.
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