Thrashing (computer science)

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In computer science, thrashing occurs in a system with memory paging when a computer's real memory (RAM) resources are overcommitted, leading to a constant state of paging (swapping, i.e. moving a page to disk) and page faults, slowing most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or even collapse. The situation can continue indefinitely until the user closes some running applications or the active processes free up additional virtual memory resources. After initialization, most programs operate on a small number of code and data pages compared to the total memory the program requires. The pages most frequently accessed at any point are called the working set, which may change over time. When the working set is not significantly greater than the system's total number of real storage page frames, virtual memory systems work most efficiently, and an insignificant amount of computing is spent resolving page faults. As the total of the working sets...

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