ITPEC FE Morning April 2020 Question 16
ITPEC FE Morning April 2020 — Question 16 of 80
Thrashing — a state where excessive paging causes system overhead to spike and CPU utilization to drop.
When too many programs run concurrently with insufficient main memory:
- Each process gets too few pages in RAM
- Constant page faults trigger continuous disk I/O
- The CPU spends most time waiting, not executing application code
Why not others:
- (a) Bottleneck — a general term for any system constraint, not specific to virtual memory overhead
- (b) Fragmentation — scattered free memory/disk blocks; does not cause the described overhead pattern
- (c) Paging — the normal mechanism of swapping pages between RAM and disk; thrashing is when paging becomes excessive
Key rule: Thrashing = many processes + small RAM → page fault storm → high overhead + low CPU utilization.
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