A page fault refers to an interruption that occurs when software attempts to read or write a virtual memory location marked as "not present". Page faults record the number of times a process must recover from a hard disk.

In Task Manager, a page fault is the number of times a process must be retrieved from disk when data is not in memory. Page fault values accumulate from the time the process was started.

Page fault increment

Changes in the number of page faults in the Task Manager since the last update.