Thrashing can happen when a system runs low on physical memory and is, therefore, constantly paging. Whenever a process gets time scheduled on the CPU, it tries to access memory that has been paged out. Loading new memory pages means that the other pages first have to be stored on-disk. Moving data back and forth between disk and memory is usually very slow, so in some cases, this more or less stalls the computer, since the system spends all its time paging. Looking at the system's page fault frequency is a good way to determine whether the program has started thrashing.
Thrashing
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