I know that the RAM cache is just taking advantage of otherwise free RAM and will be dropped in favor of anything else, but it does stress me out a bit to see it “full” like that.
Difference between Windows and Linux. Windows would only use what it needs. Linux pre-empts more and fills the RAM for what coul dbe needed.
It used to stress the shit out of me when I switched to Linux as I’d gotten used to opening task manager and seeing 90% free RAM. On Linux I’d be seeing 10% free and panicking thinking it was a resource hog.
I had a feeling that ‘factoid’ may be out of date!
Since I learnt it about the time of Windows XP when we were shown examples of how Linux and Windows memory management differed.
It all made sense why Linux seemed to have full RAM even after a big upgrade but WinXP gave the ‘illusion’ of having lots of free RAM to use.
~
20yrs ago!
I think we used SuSE Linux 7.3!
I still hold a savage hatred of all RPM-based distros after dealing with the hell of early 2000’s editions (Redhat, Mandrake & Suse). Though I did like SuSE KDE’s colours when it worked!
If you had this much buffer memory what are the reasons to have swap space as well?
Many programs do stuff once during startup that they never do again, sometimes creating redundant data objects that will never get accessed in the configuration its being run in. Eventually the kernel memory manager figures out that some pages are never used but it can’t just delete them. If swap is enabled it can swap them to disk instead. It frees up that RAM for something more important. It’s usually minor but every few MB helps.
I know that the RAM cache is just taking advantage of otherwise free RAM and will be dropped in favor of anything else, but it does stress me out a bit to see it “full” like that.
It would stress me even more to see a lot of RAM doing nothing, that would be a shame! ;-)
Difference between Windows and Linux. Windows would only use what it needs. Linux pre-empts more and fills the RAM for what coul dbe needed.
It used to stress the shit out of me when I switched to Linux as I’d gotten used to opening task manager and seeing 90% free RAM. On Linux I’d be seeing 10% free and panicking thinking it was a resource hog.
The Linux-way is the best way.
I use Arch btw ;)
Both OSes do pre-caching and for both the standard tools to check usage nowadays ignore pre-cached elements when counting RAM usage.
I had a feeling that ‘factoid’ may be out of date! Since I learnt it about the time of Windows XP when we were shown examples of how Linux and Windows memory management differed. It all made sense why Linux seemed to have full RAM even after a big upgrade but WinXP gave the ‘illusion’ of having lots of free RAM to use. ~ 20yrs ago!
I think we used SuSE Linux 7.3!
I still hold a savage hatred of all RPM-based distros after dealing with the hell of early 2000’s editions (Redhat, Mandrake & Suse). Though I did like SuSE KDE’s colours when it worked!
It’s free real estate!
If you had this much buffer memory what are the reasons to have swap space as well?
With my servers I’m paranoid having swap enabled will inadvertently slow stuff down. Perhaps there’s a reason to have it that I’m unaware of?
Many programs do stuff once during startup that they never do again, sometimes creating redundant data objects that will never get accessed in the configuration its being run in. Eventually the kernel memory manager figures out that some pages are never used but it can’t just delete them. If swap is enabled it can swap them to disk instead. It frees up that RAM for something more important. It’s usually minor but every few MB helps.