> 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

> 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