Explain the concept of thrashing in memory management.

Explain the concept of thrashing in memory management.

Thrashing in memory management refers to a situation where the operating system spends a significant amount of time and resources constantly swapping pages between the main memory and the disk. This occurs when the system is overwhelmed with too many processes demanding more memory than is available. As a result, the system becomes inefficient and performance degrades significantly. Thrashing can be caused by excessive multitasking, insufficient physical memory, or poorly optimized memory allocation algorithms. To mitigate thrashing, the operating system may employ techniques such as increasing the amount of physical memory, optimizing memory allocation strategies, or implementing virtual memory systems.