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Memory used on Windows doesn't mean the same as on Gentoo. Most of that is cached files and it will be discarded when a program needs that memory directly. Empt
by bananaface 6y ago
Memory used on Windows doesn't mean the same as on Gentoo. Most of that is cached files and it will be discarded when a program needs that memory directly. Empty memory is wasted memory, using 70mb of memory in a 32GB machine is an anti-feature. You should be caching.
My problem with OSes like Gentoo is they give you the illusion of teaching you how OSes work when you're actually just learning the structure of a decoupled Linux system. RAM caching is basic stuff (and there's basically no reason not to do it), if Gentoo was a good educational pipeline users should not be coming out with gaps in their knowledge like that.
IMO OSes like Gentoo mainly teach you how to plug together artificially isolated components (which preclude cross-cutting concerns & optimisations that rely on the structure of large sections of the system being known & predictable) and give you the illusion of understanding, while wasting a huge amount of your time debugging problems that are superficial. It's like installing a bunch of (fragile) pip packages and thinking you've learned Python. I would bank on the average Gentoo user being unable to actually write a significant OS component, and I think that's a much more useful metric than knowing how Linux plugs together.
- innocenat 6y agoI don't know how Gentoo display the RAM usage, but I am pretty sure both macOS and Windows does not show the RAM used for file caching as "used".
- bananaface 6y agoSome is hidden, some isn't. Compressed memory swells your system process (on Windows) as far as I understand it.
- leotaku 6y ago> Memory used on Windows doesn't mean the same as on Gentoo. Most of that is cached files and it will be discarded when a program needs that memory directly. I think you might be mistaken. Task Manager seems to generally consider cached memory as available. Most Linux monitoring tools I have used also do this. > Since cached pages can be easily evicted and re-used, some operating systems, notably Windows NT, even report the page cache usage as "available" memory, while the memory is actually allocated to disk pages. This has led to some confusion about the utilization of page cache in Windows.[^1] So both the Linux/Gentoo and Windows systems in question should most likely be caching files. The Windows system might even be caching less aggressively, just because almost all memory is in use by processes. [^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_cache https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_cache
- bananaface 6y agoMy understanding is that it's more complex than that. A portion is silent, but disable SysMain (SuperFetch) and reported RAM usage will also drop considerably.