Virtual Memory and Performance Counters

A few months ago my PC at work, which is running Windows XP SP2, was upgraded from 1 GB of RAM to 3 GB of RAM. I though, "Wow! With 3 GB of RAM I will not even need any virtual memory." So I went to my computer’s System Properties and turned off the paging file. After a quick reboot I was running with just 3 GB of RAM and no virtual memory, and everything was running just fine.

I happened to be working on adding some performance monitoring statistics to a Windows Service I was writing in VB.NET at the time I turned off my virtual memory, so I was using the Performance Administrative Tool that is part of Windows XP a lot. The next time I opened the Performance Administrative Tool only the "Avg. Disk Queue Length" counter was shown. The "Pages/sec" and "% Processor Time" counters were missing. When I tried to add them back to the graph, I discovered the Memory and Processor performance objects were missing from the list.

I though maybe I did something in my code to break them (although I did not really think my application would be able to affect system counters like that). I did a little research and discovered a nice tool that is part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit called the Extensible Performance Counter List (Exctrlst.exe). You can read more about this tool at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927229 https://web.archive.org/web/20130327215623/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927229 and http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/
48edd368-2bde-4647-9fea-1b5f28a23ca91033.mspx?mfr=true https://web.archive.org/web/20080223113806/http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/48edd368-2bde-4647-9fea-1b5f28a23ca91033.mspx?mfr=true. By using this tool I discovered that the perfos.dll was disabled. I re-enabled the perfos.dll and restarted the Performance Administrative Tool. The "Pages/sec" and "% Processor Time" counters were back, but as soon as I tried to add an additional counter, the "Pages/sec" and "% Processor Time" counters would stop working. If I were to exit and restart the Performance Administrative Tool, the counters would be missing once again.

At this point I was pretty sure my application was not causing the disappearance of these counters and the disabling of the perfos.dll. I then remembered that I had disabled my virtual memory and decided to try re-enabling my virtual memory. Once my machine’s virtual memory and perfos.dll had been re-enabled, the "Pages/sec" and "% Processor Time" counters came back for good.

I have not been able to find any documentation to collaborate this discovery, but it seems that the performance counters hosted by the perfos.dll will not work unless you have virtual memory enabled. I have only tried this on Windows XP SP2 machines at this time. Please let me know if you have every experienced anything similar to this. I would like to hear your stories.