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Difficulty: HardTroubleshooting Windows Performance and Application Crashes

A graphics rendering application on a Windows 11 workstation periodically freezes and crashes during large batch renders. A technician monitors the system during a render job and notes the following metrics: Physical RAM utilization reaches 98%, Resource Monitor displays sustained Hard Faults/sec exceeding 600/sec, system drive C: has less than 250 MB of free storage remaining, and System Event Viewer logs repeatedly record Event ID 2004 (Resource-Exhaustion-Detector). Which TWO of the following troubleshooting steps should the technician take to resolve the root causes of the application crashes and system unresponsiveness? (Select TWO.)

  1. Free disk space on drive C: or expand its storage volume to allow the dynamic virtual memory paging file (pagefile.sys) to expand properly.Answer
  2. Increase the physical RAM installed in the workstation to accommodate the rendering workload and reduce excessive hard page faults.Answer
  3. C
    Run `chkdsk /f` from an elevated command prompt to repair corrupt memory pages recorded in Resource Monitor.
  4. D
    Use the Performance Monitor snap-in to rebuild the default Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) service permissions.

Answer

The technician should free disk space on drive C: to ensure pagefile expansion and install additional physical RAM to mitigate severe page faulting.
The combination of 98% RAM utilization, high hard fault counts, and Event ID 2004 signifies severe memory depletion. Windows relies on the pagefile (pagefile.sys) on the C: drive for virtual memory expansion. Because the C: drive has less than 250 MB free, the pagefile cannot grow, triggering application crashes. Freeing disk space allows virtual memory allocation to function properly. Furthermore, adding physical RAM addresses the root hardware limitation, reducing the reliance on disk paging and eliminating high hard fault rates.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze diagnostic telemetry metrics from Resource Monitor and Event Viewer.
Identified 98% RAM saturation, >600 hard faults/sec, Event ID 2004 (virtual memory exhaustion), and C: drive space critically low (<250 MB).
Event ID 2004 paired with low disk space indicates the system cannot expand pagefile.sys to handle memory demands.
2
Remediate virtual memory paging constraints.
Clearing space on drive C: allows Windows to allocate and expand the paging file as virtual memory.
Without sufficient free disk space, virtual memory manager allocation requests fail, forcing application crashes.
3
Remediate physical hardware bottlenecks.
Adding physical RAM reduces the need for constant memory swapping (hard faults).
Hard faults occur when data requested by an application is not in RAM and must be retrieved from disk; more RAM keeps active rendering data in memory.

Key Concept

Troubleshooting Windows Virtual Memory Exhaustion and RAM Bottlenecks
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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Topics

Troubleshooting Windows Performance and Application Crashes

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