Question

What happens when the computer is thrashing? quizzlet?

Answer 1

When computers need to use more memory than have RAM, they'll swap out pages of memory to their drive. When they need those memory pages, they'll swap out others and swap in the needed ones. If a computer needs enough additionall memory, it can get so busy swapping that it doesn't have any (or very little) time to do any useful work. That is called thrashing.

Unix calls swapping swapping. Windows calls it paging, probably because of the memory pages. Memory pages are 4096 (4KB) sections of memory.

Unix drives are usually partitioned with a swap partition, and swap files can be made in the filesystem. Windows just has pagefiles[s].