Thrashing and its Causes

It is technically possible to reduce the number of allocated frames to the minimum, there is some number of pages that are in active use. If the process does not have this number of frames, it will very quickly page fault. At this point, it must replace some page. However, since all its pages are in active use, it must replace a page that will be needed again right away. Consequently it very quickly faults again, and again, and again. The process continues to fault, replacing pages for which it will then fault and bring back in right away. This high paging activity is called thrashing. A process is thrashing if it is spending more time paging than executing.
Thrashing results in severe performance problems. If you consider the scenario below you will understand how early paging systems behaved :
CPU utilization is monitored by the operating system. If the system finds that CPU utilization is too low, multiprogramming is increased by adding a new process; the algorithm used replaces pages without considering their linked processes. However, a process may end up needing more frames and takes pages away from other processes, causing faulting. The processes from which those pages were taken away in turn will pull pages from other processes increasing the degree of faulting. As processes queue up for the paging device and end up waiting for pages, CPU utilization decreases, in turn causing a push to increase the degree of multiprogramming. This process will keep on happening with CPU utilization decreasing even further and the CPU scheduler trying to increase multiprogramming even further. This leads to thrashing and consequent decrease in system throughput (accompanied by a large increase in page fault rate).