Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#2The title of the link (unlike the linked page) suggests that Linux is somehow to blame here... Why? Using RAM for disk caching is a good thing.
Besides, this technique is employed by Windows as well. It's just that the average Windows user probably doesn't know how much free RAM his PC has (well, the really average user doesn't know how much total RAM it has). My Windows 7 box takes at least 2GB of memory to itself for disk caching, AFAIU.
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#3The title of the link (unlike the linked page) suggests that Linux is somehow to blame here... Why? Using RAM for disk caching is a good thing . Besides, this technique is employed by Windows as well. It's just that the average Windows user probably doesn't know how much free RAM his PC has (well, the really average user doesn't know how much total RAM it has). My Windows 7 box takes at least 2GB of memory to itself…
My apologies, that's certainly not what I meant to imply (and hence the use of the word seemingly). The point I was coming from was with regards to the number of times I've had to explain these concepts to an exasperated friend or cow-orker, when they've exclaimed something along the lines of "I've just looked at `top` and there's no free memory!".
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#4So basically the same thing Vista was doing (prefetch, and admittedly it did a shitty job with >1GB ram), except since its Linux, Oh its all fine guys, we won't destroy the OS' reputation.
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#5Heh, nice site.
Note I find this useful for showing how much RAM apps really are using: http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#6So basically the same thing Vista was doing (prefetch, and admittedly it did a shitty job with >1GB ram), except since its Linux, Oh its all fine guys, we won't destroy the OS' reputation.
Right, the only thing wrong with Windows Vista was its RAM caching strategy.
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#7A good way I read somewhere was "Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Linux uses it to speed up your disk and gives it back to programs when they need it".
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#8Wouldn't it make more sense to just include the RAM used for disk-caching when calculating free memory? After all, the whole reason it's being used for disk-caching in the first place is that it's free! The Linuxoids that know what this even means can always explicitly look for the line that says how much memory is being used for caching...
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#9So basically the same thing Vista was doing (prefetch, and admittedly it did a shitty job with >1GB ram), except since its Linux, Oh its all fine guys, we won't destroy the OS' reputation.
The page is about explaining a correct behavior, not justifying some bogus memory usage. There's no reputation at stake. All modern operating systems are expected to behave that way, free RAM is wasted RAM.
Re: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memory usage to confused newbies?
#10So basically the same thing Vista was doing (prefetch, and admittedly it did a shitty job with >1GB ram), except since its Linux, Oh its all fine guys, we won't destroy the OS' reputation.
Linux has been doing this for a lot longer than Windows has. (Which I only actually know because there was so much FUD about Vista's pre-fetching when it came out.)
edit: Sorry, getting prefetching and SuperFetch confused.