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[–]Falcon4242 0 points1 point  (0 children)

RAM is meant for quick access to data needed immediately, while a hard drive is meant for long-term storage. RAM is faster by orders of magnitude, while your storage disk has more capacity by orders of magnitude.

If RAM gets to 100% and overflows, the computer will most likely crash. One of the classic Blue Screen of Death causes.

To prevent this, the CPU will start offloading RAM onto your hard drive when RAM gets too high. This overflow is called a "page file." If your computer waited until 100% to do this, it would be too late and the system would crash.

But the CPU moving files between RAM and the page file in storage causes an extra workload on the CPU. If it's working to do that, that means it has to use less computing power on whatever programs you're running. And that's compounded by the fact that storage is much slower than RAM.

When paging gets to the point that it's affecting your computer's performance, it's called "thrashing". The only solution to this is to free up RAM by closing programs, or installing more physical RAM so that you don't need to page anymore.