Teatimer page faults

[FlowrHuntr]

Teatimer has been causing excessive page faults on my system and making it freeze up. The page fault count in Task Manager was holding steady at 83/second. When I disabled it, my computer quit freezing. I don't feel comfortable surfing the web without Teatimer protection on.

Any idea why Teatimer is causing so many page faults?

Thank you for any help you can offer. I LOVE Spybot. Love it, love it, love it. Thank you so much for offering such a comprehensive and effective program for free. Tell your angels if you need anything, cause you know you got a bunch of good karma stored up! You rock!

[FlowrHuntr]

Today is the 23rd. I posted a message on the 14th about Teatimer causing excessive page faults and causing my system to freeze up for about a minute at a time with about a minute or so between each freeze. I downloaded the new version of spybot and that did not fix the problem.

I am new to this forum. Is there a reason I am not getting a reply? Am I not posting correctly?

[tashi]

Hi there.
I merged your posts. Sorry you were overlooked, it was not intentional rather the case of a busy forum. :)

Could you tell us your Operating System and which other security programs you have installed.

Also please open Spybot>Help>About
Let us know the version and latest detection update.

How long had you been using teatimer before you experienced the problem.

Thank you.

[splorp!]

I don't often reboot, so I may have a more extreme number of page faults for TeaTimer. Currently, I have over 50 million (yes, 50,000,000+) page faults caused by TeaTimer version 1.4.0.2. My Spybot version is 1.4.0.3. I've always had trouble with TeaTimer page faults. Any idea what's going on and how to get it fixed?

Last detection update is 2006-1-13. I'm running WinXP Pro(w/ service pack 2) with all pertinent updates on an AMD Athlon 2000MHz. I have 1024 MB PC-3200 RAM. I'm running Zone Alarm as my software firewall and AVG (Grisoft) as my antivirus program.

Oh, and if you think I am just an extreme example, my fiancee is running WinXP Home (w/ sp 2) with Zone Alarm and AVG and currently is at almost 30 million (30,000,000+) page faults for her TeaTimer.

Let me know if you have any answers or if TeaTimer should just be disabled.

splorp! (http://www.splorp.org)
Evil Bastard (http://www.splorp.org)

[bitman]

Page faults are a normal part of the operation of the Windows operating system and are in no way a problem. You may be thinking of 'Invalid Page Faults' which do indicate a problem and will generally cause either an application or operating system 'Blue Screen' error. See the section "What are Page Faults?" at this link for more.
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

In the case of a monitoring application such as TeaTimer, the program is constantly accessing various data areas as part of it's function. During the Beta phase of Spybot 1.3 which first included TeaTimer there were memory leak issues found with TeaTimer, especially as they related to other process monitoring applications, including the MS inscluded Task Manager. Though these were mostly fixed, the Page Faults continued.

During this testing we noticed that the number of page faults still seemed large and turned out to be about 2-3 page faults per second per process, or about 80-100pf/sec. on a typical PC. Though the exact reason for this hasn't been explained, the page faults themselves don't appear to cause any disk activity, since they occur even when the disk is totally inactive. And since other process monitoring applications appear to act the same, we stopped investigating. Only situations where actual memory was being consumed as a side effect of the interaction were explored and generally solved.

Some quick math from the above shows that at 100 page faults per second; that's 6,000pf/min, 360,000pf/hr, or 8.64 million per day! Since neither the processor utilization or disk activity usually seem to be affected, this isn't really a problem.

What you need to be concerned about is if these count rates increase drastically, since this might indicate the presence of malware and TeaTimer's attempt to battle it, though usually this would also result in lots of TeaTimer pop-ups. We have also seen rare instances of memory consumption, and more commonly problems with defragmenting older 9x operating systems.

In other words, just ignore the page faults unless they spike drastically or you detect other issues that make you suspect malware or memory consumption. The issue with freezing that FlowrHuntr mentioned above might be related to TeaTimer, but it's unlikely the page faults themselves were the source of the problem.