Sure - here’s my understanding: sloppily said, page faults occur everytime a Windows program wants to access part of a file that is opened but not completely loaded in RAM (see full explanation here). So, if you have a song loaded in Cantabile, and all plugins and all their data are loaded into RAM and everything’s chugging along nicely, there shouldn’t be any page faults.
Things change significantly with sample-based instruments and with media files: since Cantabile will regularly need to read part of a file from disk, there will always be page faults (whenever a file is open and being read from disk to RAM) in such a case. As such, nothing to worry about fundamentally - the more sample-based plugins and media files you use, the higher your page fault count will be. Especially with sample players that cache the first part of a sample in RAM and stream the rest from disk, the number of page faults can actually be pretty high.
Also, you’ll see page faults when you have a plugin GUI open, since the GUI doesn’t always seem to be fully loaded into RAM, so when the display changes, you’ll see page faults because of graphics being updated.
So, PFs are not an issue in themselves, but of course the speed in which your hard disk / SSD can supply these memory blocks does affect the performance; if the overall data supplied can’t keep up with demand, glitches / drop-outs will occur.
Therefore there is no “safe” or “unsafe” number of page faults - you’ll expect more PFs with media playback and sample-based instruments (sometimes around 6000 PFs or more with Kontakt or Spectrasonics instruments, since these always have a large number of files open for all the samples they are streaming) - it’s just a question of your drive being able to provide the data in time. An SSD certainly helps speed up things…
Cheers,
Torsten