The only way that we could find to increase the WorkingSet of a process under .NET, to reduce soft page faults, was to run the entire .NET application under a custom CLR Host. This is a non-trivial exercise, requiring about 800 lines of custom written, rather dense C++ code. The C++ code intercepts the .NET calls to the Win32 memory management methods, altering the behavior of the .NET runtime so it doesn't free memory as aggressively as it normally would.
This has the effect of incurring all of the soft page faults when the application starts up, so that during normal application execution, the number of soft page faults in the .NET app drops pretty much to zero.
This means that the application may be memory hungry, but it runs faster. In other words, we are sacrificing memory usage for increased realtime performance.
