Just to emphasise how hard faults are determining for performance – here is a plot of hard faults versus page count for the same application mentioned in the previous post.
The pattern is very similar, though it should be noted that increasing the page count does still keep the fault count coming down at the far end – but not by enough to outweigh the negative effects of having larger page tables to search through when checking for faults and looking for the least recently used page and the like.
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 