How to prevent

[caradoc]

How can one prevent their UNIX operating system from thrashing? I need some guidelines so that I can follow that for my UNIX operating system

[Ralph]

Thrashing is an I/O management issue. Ensure that your workload fits into memory, so the machine is not thrashing swapping and paging processes in and out of memory.

[sammy]

Thrashing results when the system spends all of its time managing the paging-in and paging-out of data that no real work gets done. In the worst thrashing scenario, no CPU cycles are actually used to advance the execution of any process and response times are brought to their knees.
To avoid these situation follow the following hints or guidelines:
Designate special areas of disk for paging
Follow the process of clearing message queues at appropriate times.

These activities would surely solve the problem of thrashing in UNIX operating system.

[Sam Jepsum]

Make sure you have enough memory. Also check and see what your memory is being used by. Sometimes a simple configuration problem results in thrashing.