Thrashing

Denning, P. J. (1968). Thrashing: Its causes and prevention. Proceedings of the AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference, 915-922.

Type

Conference paper

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1968

Pages

915-922

DOI

10.1145/1476589.1476705

DOI registrant

Association for Computing Machinery

Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/1476589.1476705

Cited from

computer_science

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Caching
  • T3: Working Set Larger Than Cache. When the working set exceeds cache capacity, hit rates drop precipitously (cliff behavior), and performance may be worse than with no cache (overhead without benefit)

    This sourceShows that when the combined working sets exceed available fast storage the system thrashes — hit rate collapses and performance falls toward the slow tier — the working-set-larger-than-cache cliff behavior. Re-sources marker 029 (replaces a non-supporting, mis-dated Agarwal Alewife citation).

Mechanisms

• Demand Paging
  • Past that point the fault rate explodes into thrashing — the system spends more time servicing page faults than doing useful work, and throughput collapses far out of proportion to the memory shortfall.

    This sourceDefines thrashing as explosive paging activity that consumes processing time and collapses useful throughput.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 2 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:7e00b76e937b · see in the full table