The Page Faults chart shows the rate at which Windows is processing page faults.

It compares the two types of page fault (soft and hard) and makes it easy to see the ratio between them.

A Page Fault occurs when a process references a page that is not in that processes working set (the set of pages visible to that process in physical memory). When this happens, the process has to wait while the Windows Virtual Memory Manager retrieves the page from virtual memory.

A soft page fault occurs when Windows finds the required page somewhere in physical memory.

A hard page fault occurs when the page is not in physical memory and Windows has to read it from the page files. This is by far the more expensive of the two as it involves disk I/O. Hard page faults cause Paging and can degrade performance significantly.