Thanks for the comment, that's very interesting. I hadn't considered the possibility of the desktop environment needing to do disk reads, I was thinking everyth

Thanks for the comment, that's very interesting. I hadn't considered the possibility of the desktop environment needing to do disk reads, I was thinking everything was in memory already. I suppose the solution is to figure out how to reduce or eliminate the number of disk reads after the DE initially loads, or cache everything needed in memory with a "do not evict" flag on it. Especially for the TTY, that's basically a crucial system function and keeping everything needed for it always available in memory wouldn't take much space relative to a typical desktop system. I think at least some of the problem is the program code pages getting evicted to disk, so they have to be read back to memory too, which goes to the back of the disk queue. When I'm experiencing thrashing, even basic stuff like alt-tab to switch windows doesn't work. And I assume the window manager doesn't need to do disk reads to switch windows. Even the damn X cursor freezes!