Thrashing & Virtual Memory

Question 1

Thrashing & Virtual Memory

Answer 1

With a computer, thrashing or disk thrashing describes when a hard drive is being overworked as a result of moving information between the system memory and virtual memory excessively

Thrashing occurs when the system does not have enough memory; the system swap file is not properly configured, too much is running at the same time, or has low system resources.

When thrashing occurs you will notice the computer hard drive always working and a decrease in system performance. Thrashing is bad on the hard drive because of the amount of work the hard drive has to do and if left unfixed can cause an early hard drive failure.

• To resolve hard drive thrashing you can do any of the suggestions below.
• Increase the amount of physical RAM in the computer.
• Decrease the number of programs being run on the computer.

Question 2

Adjust the size of the swap file

Answer 2

First off, understand that virtual memory is a part of the computer’s hard drive that is set aside and used like RAM by the operating system. When the physical RAM is all used up, the operating system begins to use the virtual memory. When the virtual memory is nearly all used up, the ‘Virtual Memory is Low’ warning message will appear.

Question 3

Close open programs

Answer 3

If you have multiple programs open at the same time and they are using up the majority of your RAM and virtual memory, this can cause the warning message to pop up.

Fixing this requires you to close one or more of your open programs in order to free up virtual memory and physical RAM space.

Question 4

Close and then re-open programs

Answer 4

The second possible cause is similar to the first; with the major difference being that one specific program is using up most of the available memory.

Reasons for this can be that the program uses a large amount of memory, in general, to process a particular function.

For example, photo editing, video editing, and CAD drawing programs can use up large amounts of memory at times. It’s also possible the program is not functioning correctly, stuck on some process, causing it to use large amounts of memory.

This is not normal functionality and may require you to close the program and re-open it to reset it.

Question 5

Reboot the computer

Answer 5

Rebooting the computer can help close any background programs and restore any memory that hasn’t been recovered. Reboot the computer and see if the virtual memory errors continue.

Question 6

Not enough memory

Answer 6

If your computer is several years old, not having enough memory for today’s programs can cause virtual memory errors.

For most computers’ today it is recommended that a computer has at the very minimum 512MB of memory and a recommended minimum of 1GB of memory.

The more system memory you have the less virtual memory will be used.

Question 7

Bad memory

Answer 7

The third possible cause is a bad memory chip. In this case, some of the memory may be unusable, reducing the amount of memory available overall. In many cases, a blue screen error will occur when a program tries to access the bad part of the memory chip.

In other cases, however, the low virtual memory warning message may be all that appears. Fixing this requires the replacement of the bad memory chip.

Question 8

Bad hard drive

Answer 8

Lastly, a bad hard drive could also cause this warning message to appear. If the section of the hard drive set aside as virtual memory becomes corrupted, the operating system will not be able to use it and can result in virtual memory warning messages.

Fixing this may require either a repair to the corrupted sectors on the hard drive (using a hard drive repair utility) or a replacement of the hard drive.