Thrashing
Why does paging work in practice ?
Because of locality of reference in practical programs.
If a process does not have “enough” pages to capture this locality of reference (varies from program to program and over time), the resulting page fault rate will be very high.
A high page fault rate will lead to:
- Low CPU Utilization.
- The operating system will think that it needs to increase the degree of multiprogramming (bring back swapped processes into memory)
- This will make the problem even worse!!!