Thrashing (computer science)

Imagine you're coloring a picture. You start off coloring in one spot for a little bit, then you move to another spot and color there too. Then you move to another spot, and keep doing this until you go back to the first spot again. You keep doing this over and over again, without ever finishing any one spot completely.

This is kind of what thrashing is like in a computer. When a computer is running multiple programs at the same time and it doesn't have enough memory (like RAM) to handle all of them, it starts switching back and forth between the programs. This is called "swapping" or "paging". It's like moving from one spot in the coloring book to another.

But if the computer keeps switching between the programs too often, it's like coloring a little bit in one spot and then immediately moving to the next spot, then back to the first spot again, and so on. It can't finish any one task completely because it keeps switching back and forth.

This makes the computer run really slow and inefficiently, because it's spending a lot of time swapping data in and out of its memory. It's like trying to color a picture, but never being able to finish any one part of it. That's why we call it "thrashing".