Page Fault & Performance Degradation

Page faults, by their very nature, degrade the performance of a program or operating system and in the degenerate case can cause thrashing. Optimizations to programs and the operating system that reduce the number of page faults that occur improve the performance of the program or even the entire system. The two primary focuses of the optimization effort focus on reducing overall memory usage and improving memory locality. Generally, making more physical memory available also reduces page faults. Many page replacement algorithms have been proposed, implementing a heuristic to reduce the incidence of page faults.