As RAM is filled, paging will start, and if the programs try to access the memory that has been swapped out, thrashing occurs. Start one or more memory-intensive programs.Ģ. Using this or any other memory-intensive program, the steps required to reproduce the condition I described areġ. I am including a short C++ program that allocates and accesses a large amount of memory, guaranteeing thrashing will occur on any system. Running these programs plus another memory-intensive program like Mathematica can generate thrashing even when 2GB or 4GB of physical memory are available. On my ASUS netbook running Ubuntu 10.04, with only 1GB RAM, thrashing can occur as easily as running both Chromium (which is a bit of a memory hog) and the Resynthesizer plugin in the GIMP at the same time. It is not hard to make a system go into thrashing, especially if it is low on memory (that's probably true in general, not only of Ubuntu). This can be both an annoyance and a security threat (since a process without elevated privileges can effectively hang the system).

This means that if a program either misbehaves or simply needs more memory than available RAM, it might be hard or impossible to stop it, either locally or remotely. It can be minutes before any interaction has an effect, including remote connections.

Thrashing on Ubuntu seems to make it almost impossible to interact with the system.

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