What is Trashing?
What is Thrashing in an Operating System?
Thrashing (often misspelled as “trashing”) is a condition in an operating system where the CPU spends most of its time swapping pages in and out of memory instead of executing actual processes. It happens when there is severe memory pressure, leading to an extremely high page-fault rate.
Key Points
- Cause: Too many processes or too little RAM, so the working sets of processes do not fit in memory.
- Symptoms: Very high paging I/O, low CPU utilization, and slow system performance.
- Context: Common in virtual memory systems that use paging.
- Control: Reduce degree of multiprogramming, allocate more frames, or use working-set/PFF policies.