Page Faults Unpacked
In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein dives into page faults—those kernel callbacks that happen when your process touches memory without a physical page. He walks you through virtual memory basics (abstraction, sharing, swapping, NUMA optimizations) and VMA regions (text, data, BSS, heap, stack) before showing you what really happens in kernel mode.
He then breaks down every flavor of page fault—first-touch, stack expansion, copy-on-write, swap-in, file-backed, and permission slips—complete with timestamps for each segment. If you’ve ever wondered why missing pages can blow your performance budget, this crash course is your new best friend.
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