Thrashing refers to the state of a system where most of the CPU time is spent paging in and out memory from the swap file. This happens when real storage is heavily over committed and storage references encompass a wide range of virtual pages over a short processing time.

Such a condition can indicate a poorly tuned application where paging is caused by the process of accessing data the application needs. A typical scenario is where work data is chained in a single, very extended, queue and no mechanism exits to access the required data without scanning the entire chain. Use of hashing techniques greatly reduce this problem.

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