In: Operations Management
What is the difference between a soft and hard page fault?
When the application has been a standby for a long time, then it will take a long time to activate the application again. The application will slowly load itself into memory because each memory-page access will give a page fault:
Hard page faults occur when the page is not located in physical memory or a memory-mapped file created by the process The performance of applications will suffer when there is insufficient RAM and excessive hard page faults occur. It is imperative that hard page faults are resolved in a timely fashion so that the process of resolving the fault does not unnecessarily delay the program’s execution.
A soft page fault occurs when the page is resident elsewhere in memory. For example, the page may be in the working set of another process. Soft page faults may also occur when the page is in a transitional state because it has been removed from the working sets of the processes that were using it, or it is resident as the result of a prefetch operation.