Thrashing (computer science)

In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer's virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse greatly. The situation may continue indefinitely until the underlying cause is addressed. The term is also used for various similar phenomena, particularly movement between other levels of the memory hierarchy, where a process progresses slowly because significant time is being spent acquiring resources. Thrashing can be caused by several factors, which can include lack of RAM, too many programs being ran, or programs that may have issues with memory usage and memory leakage. Some programs may have higher working priorities than others, which can cause thrashing as well.