Definition: - Storage Technology Magazine
Disk thrashing: In systems that use virtual memory, disk thrashing manifests as slow or stalled application performance at the same time as a lot of disk activity. Sometimes referred to as swapping pages, it's the result of a hard drive being used excessively for virtual memory because the physical RAM memory is full. Disk thrashing slows down the performance of a system because data has to be transferred back and forth from the hard drive to the physical memory. It's common in older PCs with limited amounts of RAM.

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This was first published in August 2004