Is the XP VMM a bottleneck on a multi core machine?

Question

I have a dual Xeon hex core machine running an IO intensive application. (WinXP 32) I am seeing a hardware driver (1/2 user mode, 1/2 kernel, streaming data) that is using 6k delta page faults per second. When other applications load or allocate large amounts of memory the driver's hardware buffer gets an underrun (application not feeding it fast enough).

Could this be because the kernel is only using one core to service page fault interrupts?

Answer 1

Yes, that could easily be the problem - the operating system that came out after XP is better at this, as is the operating system that came after that, so maybe consider that option.