Excessive Paging


I'm running an XP SP2 machine that has experienced an incredible
decrease in performance over the past couple months and I'm trying to
determine why. At first I thought the hard drive might be at fault
since I was seening It would appear to me that the machine is
needlessly paging based on the PerfMon.exe Pages/sec counter and the
taskman performance numbers. Can someone verify I'm on the right track
and possibly offer solutions?

Here's what I'm seeing:

Perfmon.exe (Pages/Sec) averages of 30-60 with a scale of 1

TaskMan: Performance

Physical Memory (K)

Total : 392,496
Available: 170,000
System Cache 240,000


Commit Charge(K)

Total 158,568
Limit 550,000
Peak 170,000

CPU usage averages about 5-20% but of course spikes at times.


What I don't understand, and perhaps it's my interpretation of the
perfmon counter, is why I have such a high page/sec rate when my peak
commit charge isn't even half of the physical memory. Shouldn't my
commit charge be much higher before paging starts hitting 40+
pages/sec? Is page size 4k? 160k/second when I have a couple hundred
megs of physical memory available?

I did not look at these numbers before I started having performance
problems (long boot times, 5 minutes to log on, etc) so perhaps these
are not out of line, but if not, can someone explain to me what I'm
missing in my interpretation?

Thanks,
Ray

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