question for the computer learned, page-15

50ftCat, I here ya, and you should be right, but the definitions used aren't all what they imply.

I know that in my system when the PF bar hits my physical limit then my system crawls.

And looking over at wikipedia we have the following

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commit_charge

"In the Task Manager utility under Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, the graphical displays labeled "PF usage" and "Page File Usage History" actually reflect not the pagefile contents but the total (or current) commit charge. The height of the graph area corresponds to the commit limit. Despite the label, these do not show how much has actually been written to the pagefile, but only the maximum potential pagefile usage at the moment. In Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0, these same displays are labeled "Mem usage" but again actually show the commit charge."

I'm not going to try to understand the detail, but suffice to say the commit charge (PF usage see above) is usually close to or is the amount that my programs use and when they use more than you physically have then disk is used and the system crawls.