Let's discuss some of the trade-offs that virtual memory systems entail. First, let us look at page size.

Remember that in most systems, pages and frames are the same size, often 512 bytes up to 8192 bytes, and always a power of 2. The size of the page is perhaps the most critical factor in the design and tuning of a virtual memory system. If it is too small, the page tables will be too large and the associative memory will have to be larger to achieve the same hit ratio. If the page size is too large, internal fragmentation becomes unacceptably high and each page fault causes many more bytes to be transferred between disk and memory.