What is the thrashing flow?

"Thrashing" is a computer term. When someone is working on, say, an article on David buying the land to build the temple for the ark of the covenant, the operating system keeps open pages and applications in its active memory. Sometimes, the writer has too many windows open, like, say, a word processor with the article, a spreadsheet to remind her which subjects she's working on, an email program, a weather notifier, a webpage editor, a file explorer so she can shift files around, a photo editor because she has to figure out how to make a "whale-bear," and a web browser with open tabs for the website in question, BibleGateway for some reason, three tabs to look up things, two free image sites, and Wikipedia to tell her what "thrashing" means.

Modern computers can handle that. Older computers with less memory and more reasonable users couldn't. If said person is quickly going back and forth from word processor to web page editor to browser to spreadsheet—all while the weather app and the email program are constantly updating—it's too much for the computer to handle in its active memory. The processing speed starts to slow down, programs freeze, and eventually everything collapses.

"Thrashing flow" is the term used for how this affects the user. At the beginning, she barely notices. Maybe the spreadsheet takes a second longer to pop up. Or maybe the word processor takes a bit to save changes. So our writer takes a pause. Then it takes longer, and our writer gets frustrated. Then it gets loonger and our writer gets coffee. Then it gets looonger and our user checks Twitter on her phone. Then it takes loooonger and the programs freeze and smoke starts wafting from the monitor and she throws her computer out the window.

Which is unfortunate as she'd just gotten to the interesting part of the article about the threshing floor.

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