What is Thrashing?

A state in which physical memory is so short that pages are constantly evicted and reloaded, and little useful work gets done. It is relieved by running fewer processes or adding memory.

Field: OS & Hardware

Thrashing in the explanations

Questions that mention Thrashing (2)

  1. With FIFO page replacement, adding physical pages can sometimes increase page faults. What is this phenomenon called?
  2. What is the state called in which physical memory is so short that pages are constantly evicted and reloaded and little work gets done?

Related terms

Copy-on-write Deadlock ASID Context switch Demand paging Device driver Hypervisor Interrupt handler Interrupt vector table IOMMU

Back to the glossary