I know this is !LinuxMemes but it'll throw this here. Comparing memory usage like this is meaningless. My Linux desktop for example consumes around 20GB with nothing visibly started. ZFS would happily gobble up half of the system RAM for caching unless limited. And caching means speed. If your system isn't caching a lot, it might be leaving speed on the table. Demand caching!
I don't get why this is always mentioned. Windows caches too and uses up all free space for faster application startup, but just because it also does it doesn't change the fact that it uses more ram for active processes while doing nothing. I remember Minecraft running a lot better on my old MacBook with just 4gb of ram as Ubuntu used less than Mac OS X and I could allocate more to the game, whether cacheing was enabled or not on those OSes was not relevant. This should not be relevant today as 32gb of ram can be purchased for less than 100 bucks but sadly is as Apple and other laptop manufacturers think selling soldered 8gb is ok for a base model in 2023 for a laptop costing more than 300 bucks
RAM is the fastest and most expensive memory in your PC. It uses energy, regardless of whether you use the memory. Not utilising RAM is a waste of resources.
There’s a reason good monitoring tools draw a stacked RAM chart.
Exactly. I wish we moved to a process lifecycle that has a "save your data because you're dying upon the return from this function" stage, similar to the way Android has it. That would allow us to keep a lot more processes in RAM. But it would require massive software changes given the body of software written the classical way and so it's unlikely to happen.
Sometimes i wonder why Windows use RAM so much compared to Linux ?
I check Linux run so much service in the background but used so little RAM compared to Windows that run not so many service but still used RAM so much like my PC running supercomputer programs
It's always nice to have a failsafe if some process has a major memory leak. Otherwise if your memory fills up your system completely freezes with no way to recover.
This isn't quite true. The system does recover. The mechanism doing the recovery is the kernel OOM killer which begins to shoot processes to free up RAM. Now whether or not the processes you care about survive or not and whether they lost any data you care about is a different question. 🤭 That's a problem elegantly solved on Android by the introduction of its more complex lifecycle which provides data persistence guarantees.
Actually the swapping is what freezes up the PC writing to disk like it was RAM is just too slow.. If you don't have swap enabled, either the kennel will throw out processes or one could crash cause of memory errors.
You don't need it, but a gig of disk space is basically free, so why not? Swap is generally a good thing.
The core difference is that with swap when the system needs more RAM the kernel has a choice between A) Evicting pages from the disk cache or B) Swapping out anonymous data (memory not backed by a file). If you don't have swap the choice is limited to just A. (There are a few other ways to reclaim RAM but these are the biggest two). The means that with swap you will see thrashing if your whole working set doesn't fit in ram, without swap you will see thrashing if all anonymous memory + the rest of your working set doesn't fit into RAM. Basically having no swap pins all anonymous memory in RAM, even if it isn't being used. In most cases it is better to give the kernel more choices, because swapping out some background process that has been sleeping for the last 2h and will probably sleep for another 2 is much better than evicting a page of an active application from the disk cache (that will need to be read back soon).
Damn, so my machine with 32GB of RAM can use 14.5 GB when I have all my screens full of applications and programs instead of 16GB 😎
What a score if you're in 1995 still.
Don't get me wrong, I use Linux and have a recycle pile laptop running a jellyfin server but this RAM thing is just so dumb. Modern machines have far more system resources than you'd ever need to optimize your build so much for. Tricks like these are only useful for getting more use from outdated hardware.