In computer science,
thrashing occurs when a computer's virtual memory resources are overused, leading to a constant state of paging and page faults, inhibiting most application-level processing.[1] This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse. The situation can continue indefinitely until either the user closes some running applications or the active processes free up additional virtual memory resources.
After completing 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 are called the working set.
"Thrashing" is also used in contexts other than virtual memory systems; for example, to describe cache issues in computing or silly window syndrome in networking.
