When it comes to virtual memory, which of the following is true of "thrashing"?

When it comes to virtual memory, which of the following is true of "thrashing"?

• It can be caused by poor paging algorithms
• It is a natural consequence of virtual memory systems
• It always occurs on large computers
• It can always be avoided by swapping 

EXPLANATION

 With virtual memory, which is illustrated in the accompanying figure, when an operating system spends much of its time paging, instead of executing application software, it is said to be thrashing.

 true

In operating systems that implement a virtual memory space the programs allocate memory from an address space that may be much larger than the actual amount of RAM the system possesses. The OS is responsible for deciding which programs "memory" is in actual RAM. It needs a place to keep things while they are "out". This is what is called "swap space", as the OS is swapping things in and out as needed. When this swapping activity is occurring such that it is the major consumer of the CPU time, then you are effectively thrashing. You prevent it by running fewer programs, writing programs that use memory more efficiently, adding RAM to the system, or maybe even by increasing the swap size. 

A page fault occurs when the memory access requested (from the virtual address space) does not map to something that is in RAM. A page must then be sent from RAM to swap, so that the requested new page can be brought from swap to RAM. As you might imagine, 2 disk I/Os for a RAM read tends to be pretty poor performance.