Which of the following is a condition that occurs in computer systems when the…

Concept

Modern systems use virtual memory: a process's pages live partly in RAM and partly on disk (the swap or page file). When a needed page is not in RAM, a page fault forces the OS to fetch it from disk, often evicting another page. If physical memory is over-committed, pages are evicted and re-fetched almost immediately, so page faults pile up and the CPU sits idle waiting on slow disk I/O instead of doing useful work.

Applying it here

The stem describes exactly this state: the system spends more time moving pages back and forth between RAM and the hard drive than running actual instructions. That self-reinforcing, paging-dominated, low-throughput condition is called thrashing. The cure is to reduce the degree of multiprogramming or add RAM so the working sets of active processes fit in physical memory.

Contrast with the near-misses

• Deadlock: two or more processes are permanently blocked, each waiting for a resource the other holds; the system stalls, but the cause is a circular wait on resources, not heavy paging I/O.

• Starvation: a low-priority process is indefinitely denied CPU or resources because others keep being scheduled ahead of it; it is a fairness and scheduling problem, not a memory-paging overload.

• Fragmentation: free memory or disk space is broken into scattered, unusable pieces (internal or external); it wastes capacity but does not by itself describe time lost to RAM-to-disk swapping.

• Bottleneck: a generic term for the single slowest component that caps overall throughput; it names where a limit is, not the specific paging-overload condition the stem defines.

Result

The condition is thrashing.