Thrashing occurs when a computer's performance degrades or collapses. When a system spends more time processing page faults than executing transactions, it is said to be thrashing. While processing page faults is required to reap the benefits of virtual memory, thrashing is detrimental to the system. More transactions require processing from the paging device as the page fault rate increases. The queue at the paging device grows, resulting in a longer response time for a page fault.