3 ms·

It's memory that the kernel cannot use to cache other applications' files.

• surajrmal 6mo ago
  This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have something similar.
  • progval 6mo ago
    Linux supports it too through madvise(): MADV_FREE (since Linux 4.5) The application no longer requires the pages in the range specified by addr and size. The kernel can thus free these pages, but the freeing could be delayed until memory pressure occurs. and MADV_DONTNEED Do not expect access in the near future. (For the time being, the application is finished with the given range, so the kernel can free resources associated with it.) After a successful MADV_DONTNEED operation, the semantics of memory access in the specified region are changed: subsequent accesses of pages in the range will succeed, but will result in either repopulating the memory contents from the up-to-date contents of the underlying mapped file (for shared file mappings, shared anonymous mappings, and shmem- based techniques such as System V shared memory segments) or zero-fill-on-demand pages for anonymous private mappings. Does Chrome use it, though?
  • kasabali 6mo ago
    ...still not an excuse for using 2.4GB for a tab.