how to disable zero-page thread

Question

We are hosting windows virtual machines on Linux host. We found that under this case, the virtual machine will immediately consumes all virtual machine allowed at boot up stage. I am consuming that the zero-page thread is filling up unused memory region with zeroes.

My question is does zero-page thread exit and if it does, is it possible to disable it?

Thank you very much for the help.

Best,

Answer 1

Hello,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

The zero-page thread is a system thread responsible for zeroing any free pages when there are no other threads that need to run.) The system treats all threads with the same priority as equal. The system assigns time slices in a round-robin fashion to all threads with the highest priority.

As it's part of the Windows memory management system, disabling the zero-page thread or any other thread impact security and stability of Windows OS. Hence it's not recommended to disable it while there's no effective evidence.

Meanwhile this memory consumption issue could be caused by other factors. You can also check the virtualization settings or if there's any malware inside the Windows OS.

If you insist disabling zero-page thread, it's always a good idea to make a full checkpoint and or disk snapshot before taking action.

Hope this answer can help you well.