Thrashing

“Thrashing” is a phenomenon which occurs when caching things when the “working set” – i.e. the number of items in immediate demand – exceeds the physical capacity of the system. The symptoms are constant evictions/replacements of items with very little forward progress. Thrashing can appear in many guises in resource allocation or scheduling. Examples include:

Memory cache filling.
TLB replacement.
Page allocation in paging.
Run-time memory Management.
Processes cooperating/competing.

Articles on Concepts

About this resource • Application Binary Interface (ABI) • Arrays • Atomicity • Boot • Cache • Cacheability • Caching • Concepts • Containers • Context • Context Switching • Deadlock • Direct Memory Access (DMA) • Environment Variables • Exceptions • File Attributes • Fragmentation • Hypervisor • Interrupts • Operation Ordering • PATH • Pointers • Process Scheduling • Processes • Processor Privilege • Queues • Real Time • Reentrancy • Relocatable Code • Spooling and Buffering • Synchronisation • Thrashing • Threads • Virtual Memory • Virtualisation

Articles on IO

Cacheability • Device Drivers • Direct Memory Access (DMA) • IO • Interprocess Communication • Interrupt Controller • Interrupt Service Routines (ISRs) • Interrupts • Libraries • Peripheral devices • Pipes • Queues • Queues Extra • Resources • Shell • Sockets • Spooling and Buffering • Starvation • Streams • System Calls • Thrashing • Timers • Using Peripherals • Virtualisation • Write Buffer

Articles on Processes

About this resource • Atomicity • Containers • Context • Context Switching • Daemons • Fork Unix • Hypervisor • Idle • Interprocess Communication • Multi Threading • Mutual exclusion • Pipes • Pointer Arithmetic • Process Control Block (PCB) • Process Priority • Process Scheduling • Process States • Processes • Queues • Queues Extra • Race Conditions • Real Time • Resources • Scheduler • Signal and Wait • Sleep • Starvation • Synchronisation • Thrashing • Threads • Unix Signals