Accessing the page requires a mapping to be added to the process's virtual address space.
The page fault handler in the operating system will then generally pass a segmentation fault to the offending process, indicating that the access was invalid; this usually results in abnormal termination of the code that made the invalid reference.
Operating systems provide differing mechanisms for reporting page fault errors.
UNIX-like systems typically use signals, such as SIGSEGV, to report these error conditions to programs.
An experienced user can retrieve detailed information using WinDbg and the minidump that Windows creates during the crash.
Major page faults on conventional computers using hard disk drives can have a significant impact on their performance, as an average hard disk drive has an average rotational latency of 3 ms, a seek time of 5 ms, and a transfer time of 0.05 ms/page.
Performance optimization of programs or operating systems often involves reducing the number of page faults.