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It seems like the author doesn’t understand how the OS manages memory. It is good to have a lot of memory used. You don’t get your money back for the RAM you sa
by thealistra 5y ago
It seems like the author doesn’t understand how the OS manages memory. It is good to have a lot of memory used. You don’t get your money back for the RAM you save.
The only worthwile metric is how fast stuff actually runs/noticable wait times on swapping, etc
The OS uses the ram as this makes running tasks faster. No point in keeping it free.
- orangepanda 5y ago> It is good to have a lot of memory used. You don’t get your money back for the RAM you save. Only when looking at a system as a whole. Individual applications should still use as little RAM as possible; some people run more than just slack.
- gruez 5y ago>The OS uses the ram as this makes running tasks faster. No point in keeping it free. this meme[1] needs to die. windows, mac, and linux (htop) all correctly differentiate between "used but used for cache" RAM and "used for application" RAM. When people are talking about not having enough free ram, they're talking about chrome, spotify, and slack taking up 2GB each, not the output of "free" showing only 8MB free. [1] https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
- zozbot234 5y agoIn most OS's, all available RAM is automatically used as a file cache, and is not considered "used" in system load stats. Available RAM is absolutely not "wasted", and tasks which use more RAM actually make the system slower since memory bandwidth is the likeliest bottleneck in modern systems.
- periheli0n 5y agoThese were my thoughts, too. Most RAM these days goes into caching apps and files that might be needed. Inverse swapping of sorts. Is it possible that the problem is worse on Windows because of the DLL zoo, with each app shipping its own, whereas the Mac makes heavier use of shared Frameworks?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]