Very high hard page fault resolution times

[Question2]

Using win 7 64 bit, have 16 gb of ram and 4gb of page file size on my SSD.

Using the latency monitor program, i noticed that sometimes i get very high hard page fault resolution times, which seems to be coming from either microsoft security essentials (msmpeng.exe) or firefox.exe.

Any ideas on how to figure out why they have very high hard page fault resolution times exactly? The program itself does not say why, and i have plenty of free RAM/page file size. Windows is only using 1gb out of the 4gb of page file size i have allocated and even the highest amount of RAM used is only 12/16 gb.

Here's an example :

REPORTED HARD PAGEFAULTS
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hard pagefaults are events that get triggered by making use of virtual memory that is not resident in RAM but backed by a memory mapped file on disk. The process of resolving the hard pagefault requires reading in the memory from disk while the process is interrupted and blocked from execution.

NOTE: some processes were hit by hard pagefaults. If these were programs producing audio, they are likely to interrupt the audio stream resulting in dropouts, clicks and pops. Check the Processes tab to see which programs were hit.

Process with highest pagefault count: firefox.exe

Total number of hard pagefaults 160
Hard pagefault count of hardest hit process: 78
Highest hard pagefault resolution time (µs): 295075.068922
Total time spent in hard pagefaults (%): 0.150032
Number of processes hit: 6

Edit : Theres noticeable stutter/pausing when this happens, so yes there is a performance issue that i believe is linked to the long hard page fault resoluton times.

 

[LMiller7]

Hard page faults don't necessarily involve pagefile access and in fact most do not. Microsoft Security Essentials will generate considerable numbers of hard page faults when doing a scan and possibly other things. Just about any process doing a lot of file accees will do this.

 

[Question2]

Hard page faults don't necessarily involve pagefile access and in fact most do not. Microsoft Security Essentials will generate considerable numbers of hard page faults when doing a scan and possibly other things. Just about any process doing a lot of file accees will do this.

That doesnt answer much unfortunately. How do i stop the hard page faults from causing stutters/pauses?