Just task switching on a CPU should not possibly be able to do that, so sounds like it's thrashing[1], would kind of fit except that with SSDs it should recover

Just task switching on a CPU should not possibly be able to do that, so sounds like it's thrashing[1], would kind of fit except that with SSDs it should recover much faster than HDD. But I'd certainly put it more on IO than cpu. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)