Question : My RAM use is at 30% but I'm still getting page faults.

I have SQL2005 64-bit running on a Server 2008r2 64-bit machine in a virtual machine on an ESXi host.

SQL access is slow.  I know there are many ways SQL itself could be the problem (the queries, the data structure, etc) but right now I'm looking at the windows machine itself.

One thing I'm seeing that I'm wondering about is Page Faults.  This machine has 8gb RAM and %Committed Bytes In Use stays around 30% but during intense SQL searches I'm seeing a lot of Page Faults.

I know that there are Hard Page Faults and Soft Page Faults and that it's the Hard Page Faults that slow things down and I know that PageFaults/sec counter doesn't distinguish between the two.  I  know that there are other counters I can use to help determine the number of Page Faults but before I get into those other counters I want to ask these questions here:

As long as I have plenty of free memory, the PageFaults/sec counter must be Soft Page Faults, correct?

There's no way memory pages are being swapped to disk when there is plenty of free RAM available, correct?

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

Answer : My RAM use is at 30% but I'm still getting page faults.

The only real difference is the way in which you migrate the public folders.

Transitioning from Exchange 2007 (SBS2008) requires the MoveAllReplicas script from the Exchange Management Shell as per: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb331970.aspx whilst this will also work with Exchange 2003 it's easier to use the method in my article.  Unfortunately that won't work for 2007 so you need to use this script.