Pages of memory with this property are swapped between RAM and disk according to cache replacement algorithms that are commonly variants of Least Recently Used, or LRU. For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this property of memory that, while appearing to applications as a single contiguous range, is really an OS abstraction over a combination of noncontiguous physical memory blocks and swapped-out pages.
ANSWER: virtual memory
[10m] An inappropriate cache replacement algorithm might contribute to this situation, in which a processor’s collective working set is too large, causing excessive swapping of pages in and out of memory and greatly hindering its usable capacity.
ANSWER: thrashing
[10h] Description acceptable. One could minimize page faults and thus thrashing, all else being equal, by using Bélády’s impossible but theoretically optimal page replacement algorithm, which evicts the item with this property.
ANSWER: the page that will be used farthest in the future [accept equivalent descriptive answers like “the page with the latest expected access time”]
<Alistair Gray, Other Science - Computer Science>