I just installed some extra RAM and set my paging file size to 0 for all drives on my Win7 machine. Task manager shows plenty of physical memory as being free, yet some processes are still experiencing a "pagefault delta," or PF delta. Why is this?
Ref here for a similar question, although with a different focus.
Extending virtual memory using swapfiles/pagefiles isn't the only use of paging.
Read-only data like programs' executable code, or more generally memory-mapped files, are also loaded on demand using paging, directly from the original files. They might have been pushed out of RAM by cached files that were more needed at some moment.
Your memory will gradually fill with dirty pages that may never be read again. With no page file, these must remain in memory forever, forcing the system to eject clean pages. When these clean pages are needed, they fault back in, causing excessive, wasteful page faults. Put your pagefile back and let your system function the way its designers intended.
There are different types of pagefault. What you want to avoid are hard page faults, when data must be read from the disk. But there are also soft pagefault, where data is in the standby cache/Superfetch cache and this is shown in taskmgr.
