A page fault is a trap to the software raised by the hardware when a program accesses a page that is mapped in the virtual address space, but not loaded in physical memory.
The hardware that detects this situation is the memory management unit in a processor. The exception handling software that handles the page fault is generally part of an operating system. The operating system tries to handle the page fault by making the required page accessible at a location in physical memory or kills the program in case it is an illegal access.
Contrary to what their name might suggest, page faults are not errors and are common and necessary to increase the amount of memory available to programs in any operating system that utilizes virtual memory, including Microsoft Windows,Unix-like systems (including Mac OS X, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX), and z/OS. Note that Microsoft uses the term hard fault in its Resource Monitor to mean 'page fault' [1].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_faulthttp://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/arch ... aults.aspxApache is infamous for soft faults.
the fasterer it goes the more ya gets -