this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
680 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
59613 readers
2984 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Idle RAM usage means literally nothing.
Unless you don't have a lot of ram and don't want to spill over into swap?
Aside from that, why would you say that? So if it idled at 8 GB of ram (which it is on its way to eventually doing) would you still say that?
Do you have any idea how ridiculous of a concept it is that a clean operating system alone idles alone on 4gb of ram? What in the hell are the services doing that would make it idle that high? The bloat stacks too you know, if the code that is used to run services in an operating system is inefficient, it will get proportionally worse the more services and programs you open up.
That has nothing to do with idle RAM. If you are swapping while idle, you have HORRIBLY fucked up. RAM usage is (and should be) determined by memory pressure. When idling, there should be none.
Yes. Idle RAM usage means nothing. You need to measure how much it contributes to memory pressure.
No.
Preloading and caching in otherwise wasted space.
Memory pressure? You mean niceness?
Niceness just gives a program a higher CPU (and thus, RAM) priority.
Your system is still going to swap. The idling ram doesn't magically go away. That's how it works. If it didn't, you start experiencing bugs, crashes, and data loss, because there is no more room in the pool.
Just because a computer is "idle" doesn't mean it isn't doing anything, it is still performing work to stay on, composite your window manager, display it, run services in the background. Those services are still programs that are often vital to the operating system actually functioning, you can't just make that utilization magically disappear because you need more RAM because they tend to have lower niceness values than programs in userspace, even Windows understands that.
Yes, if you are swapping at idle then you indeed did do something horribly wrong, it is a bit comical that you don't realize that proves my point. The explorer.exe devs indeed did something horribly wrong, they released shitty half baked code because managers think more code = harder/better work when it is actually the reverse.