In this case, I used WPR to record Disk IO and File IO activity while forcing the system to use the page file.
#Page file monitor windows 10 free
Microsoft Windows Performance Recorder/Analyzer is part of the free Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) and can capture activity related to hard page faults and the processes and files associated with them. Using Windows Performance Recorder/Analyzer In this case, we can see the file C:\pagefile.sys being written to by the System process. This data comes from Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and shows much more data than what performance counters can provide. The Disk tab shows the processes and files involved in live disk activity. The Disk Activity pane in Microsoft Resource showing reads and writes to pagefile.sys. Resource Monitor is built into the operating system and can be launched from the Performance tab of Task Manager. This can be collected and/or viewed with tools such as the Microsoft Performance Recorder/Analyzer, Microsoft Resource Monitor, or Sysinternals Process Monitor.
The only real way of knowing if a page file is actually being “read from” or “written to” is to get a file IO trace. In addition, hard page faults just mean disk access. The counter \Paging File(*)\% Usage provides us the usage, but not how often a page file is actually being accessed. What this means is that there are no performance counters that *directly* measure reads and writes to a page file. In this analysis, it analyzes for low physical memory ( \Memory\Available MBytes), page file usage ( \Paging File(*)\% Usage), and disk counters related to the page file(s) to determine if they are overwhelmed when the system is low on physical memory. The PAL tool has an analysis called Physical Memory Overwhelmed and creates a factious counter called \Memory\Physical Memory Overwhelmed. This is the reason why the Performance Analysis of Logs ( PAL) tool measures a low memory condition that could cause system wide delays by taking many performance counters into consideration. Therefore, it is recommended to monitor the disk performance of the logical disks hosting a page file in correlation with these counters. High values for these counters (excessive paging) indicate disk access (generally 4 KB per page fault on x86 and 圆4 versions of Windows and Windows Server), but again, they may or may not be related to page file activity, but they contribute towards disk usage which can increase the likelihood of system-wide delays assuming the related disk(s) are overwhelmed. Hard page faults are a normal function of the operating system and happen when reading the portions of image files (DLLs and EXEs) as they are needed, when reading memory mapped files, or when reading from a page file. The performance counters \Memory\Page/sec, \Memory\Page Reads/sec, \Memory\Page Inputs/sec, \Memory\Page Writes/sec, and \Memory\Page Output/sec measure hard page faults (faults that must be resolved by disk) which may or may not be related to a page file or a low physical memory condition.