There are two types of page faults: Soft and Hard. Soft are the best; thus making hard the worst (speaking in performance terms).
In paged memory systems there are three levels of memory pages: In memory, in cache, and on disk. Most people are familiar with the in memory / on disk concept. However, most paged memory implementations keep a few recently used memory blocks in a page pool that gets written to disk when they are untouched for a certain amount of time. Basically, it's a collection of pages that are on their way out. When requesting a bit of memory that is not in the main memory banks, it goes to the page pool to see if it is a recent main memory visitor. If so, a soft page fault occurs, and the page is placed back into memory from memory (a quick operation). Pages not even in the pool have to be fetched from disk, causing a hard fault. This is the slowest and most horrible of operations for a computer and should be avoided at all costs. Too many hard page faults are often referred to as "thrashing". |
