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- A potential source of memory latency is called a minor page fault. They are
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created when a process attempts to access a portion of memory before it has been
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initialized. In this case, the system will need to perform some operations to fill
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the memory maps or other management structures. The severity of a minor page fault
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can depend on system load and other factors, but they are usually short and have a
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- A more severe memory latency is a major page fault. These can occur when the system
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has to synchronize memory buffers with the disk, swap memory pages belonging to other
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processes, or undertake any other Input/Output activity to free memory. This occurs
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when the processor references a virtual memory address that has not had a physical page
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allocated to it. The reference to an empty page causes the processor to execute a fault,
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and instructs the kernel code to allocate a page and return, all of which increases