page fault

Definition of page fault in The Network Encyclopedia.

What is Page Fault (in Microsoft Ecosystem)?

A condition that occurs in Microsoft Windows operating systems when a process looks for application code or data in its working set and doesn’t find it, causing the Virtual Memory Manager to swap the necessary information into memory.

Windows handles process information in 4-KB blocks called pages. This information can be stored as virtual memory that can be swapped from the hard disk to RAM. Pages are the basic building blocks of virtual memory in Windows and are managed by the Virtual Memory Manager.

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