Page Faults/Segment Faults in Operating System:
Definition and Explanation:
Page faults occur when a process references an address on a page that is not in memory. If there are no free frames in memory (which is usually the case), then a page of some active process from the memory must be evicted, so that the page that was faulted for can be brought in.
It is important that the operating system choose a good page replacement policy. If a page is evicted just before it will be needed again, it will also cause a page fault. If proper measures are not taken, it is possible for the system to experience thrashing.
