Disk Thrashing

Disk Thrashing

On a system with Virtual Memory, pages of memory are read from and written to the swap file as necessary. Disk Thrashing is when there is excessive paging, specifically when the I/O system is busy paging memory but the CPU is not fully utilized - generally if the system is unresponsive (i.e. slow) and there is lots of disk activity then the system is likely to be thrashing.

If disk thrashing is a problem then a short term solution may be to reduce the number of running applications. A longer term solution is to add more memory.

Also known as Thrashing.