Do I need to worry about hard faults?

I recently upgraded my RAM from 4x1GB Corsair XMS2 to 4x2GB Kingston Hyper-x because I found that I was maxing out when running FDT, Firefox 5 and Photoshop together for any length of time.

At the time that I realised how high my RAM usage was I also noticed that I was getting large amounts of hard faults while the applications were open but idle, often showing more than 100/sec for 15-20 seconds at a time. I imagined that these would clean up with new RAM, but I still see large amounts as the OS and various associated applications start up, and sometimes when FDT in particular is performing an operation.

Is this likely to just be caused by required parts of applications not being found because they're still starting up, or should I worry about the quality of the new RAM that I have bought?

Solution 1:

Hard faults, also known as page faults, are normal and not caused by faulty memory.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_fault for more details.

Basically a high fault per second rate would indicate that a program is continually have to (get the operating system to) swap bits in and out to hard-disk and since that is slow, adding extra memory may help overall performance.

But as you have mentioned, applications starting up can cause a temporary blip.

But, I don't think a fault rate of 100/sec is particular high.