page faults

[Alexander Trubin]

hi

i have a server amd64 athlon 3000+ with 1GB ram 
(dmesg,config can be found here: http://spm.usu.ru/_amd64/).
FreeBSD 5.4 amd64

running this  script while server is idle:
while 1
ls > /dev/null
end

gives me the following output of vmstat -w 1

hst# vmstat -w 1
 procs      memory      page                    disks     faults
 cpu
  r b w     avm    fre  flt  re  pi  po  fr  sr ad4 ad6   in   sy  cs us  sy id
  0 1 0  550608  86704    0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0 2174  176 2116   0  2 98
  1 1 0  550848  86596 25111   0   0   0 22879   0   0   0 2177 59365  4057 17 35 48
  1 1 0  550608  86704 50879   0   0   0 46406   0   0   0 2159 119742 5873 38 62  0
  0 1 1  550608  86704 50898   0   0   0 46407   0   0   0 2153 119890 5872 38 62  0
  1 1 0  550844  86616 50912   0   0   0 46408   0   0   0 2156 120020 5774 36 64  0
  1 1 0  550608  86704 50884   0   0   0 46408   0   0   0 2162 119745 5841 33 67  0
 		...
		
doing the same thing on freebsd 5.4,4.11 on i386 produces much less
number of flt(page faults) which rarely goes above 4000-5000. 
I'm just trying to tune my apache with cgi version of php, which now
have not so good performance. Is the high number of page faults ok on
amd64? If not, what can be the reason and how can i reduce it ? i can
provide any additional information.

thanks in advance.

--
Alexandr S Trubin