For those who couldn’t read the Linux GUI:
- Windows used 3.4 GB / 8GB
- Linux used 800 MB/ 8 GB
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Oh yeah? But does linux allow you to install Ram Booster to instantly free up ram in one click? /s
Someone should make a RAM Booster app that essentially just execute
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_cachesin a terminal.Reminds me of companies that raise the price of something just so they can have a sale. “Look how much you save!”
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
I’ve never owned a laptop that didn’t have upgradeable RAM.
I also don’t pay for Apple products so that might be why. Vote with your wallets and stop buying their overpriced metal bullshit.
The ancient MacBook in question has a firmware limitation and thus only supports 4gb, it was already upgraded from 2gb iirc (black 2007 MacBook 3,1). My current laptop has 16gb soldered, too bad that the hinge will die again before the ram becomes insufficient
Holy crap that’s a long lived laptop.
I’m still using my 2014 MBP as a daily driver. They’re surprisingly long lasting. Only thing I’m rolling with still that’s older is a Lenovo X220 that I use to play a starship bridge simulator with haha.
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.
Ask devs how many issue reports they gather about app consumes too much ram.
Fires up MongoDB. Oops there goes all my ram.
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So what you’re saying is that Windows makes better use of available memory, by actually using it, than Linux? Unused memory does nothing for you.
Its not even a good comparison. I had GUI Linux running on a Wii console. I think Wii has 100MB of RAM.
shouldn’t the videos be swapped? like, having the music “dread” part be when he sees how much ram windows uses?
Regular linux users with >4GB RAM don’t need swap IMO. You can use swap for hybernation, but most people don’t even use that feature.
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.
There is EarlyOOM which you can configure to shoot processes except the ones you care about.
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.
Hibernation absolutely rocks, though.
Insert 16GB of ZRAM here
Zram is a must
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).
Doesn’t Windows reserve ram though, so it’s idle just looks higher?
I’d imagine it’d be more relevant how their ram usage looks during peaks. I still think it’d be more in Linux’s favor, but not as much.
iirc, ‘in use’ memory as reported by task manager does include some file cache memory space.
Linux does the same. It’s the orange bar in the group output
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 programsThat’s not ideal. You should be seeing more used for disk cacheing.
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.
Modern machines have far more system resources than you’d ever need
Clearly you have never opened two Electron apps /s
