Comment by lynguist
3 years ago
The memory management on Linux is worse than in Windows and Mac.
Mac has an efficient memory compression and dynamic swap system, Windows also has one, but a little bit less efficient in my personal experience, and on Linux you have to configure zRAM or zSwap and they don’t work as well. You can’t keep memory pages as compressed data in RAM what you can do in Mac and Windows. The out of memory behavior is also very bad on Linux, where it will just lock your system. On Mac it will spill swap to disk as much as you have disk space.
That is one anecdote for how Linux has a bit an inferior user experience.
> The out of memory behavior is also very bad on Linux, where it will just lock your system.
Don't modern distributions come with the OOM killer? On my Arch system I didn't have to do anything to have the one from systemd.
My anecdote is this:
I had a Ubuntu 20.04 VM from university with 64 GB memory and my process needed 70 GB and it did lock my system.
And the anecdote continues: I ran a 55 GB process on a 16 GB Mac and it finished without a problem and without me having to configure anything.
I don't think Ubuntu 20.04 is considered "modern" in this discussion, though macos did, at the time, already have ram compression.
Also, as a curiosity, do you know how much swap there was? Usually, distros only create a limited amount of it. But I agree, as a user, you shouldn't have to worry about that.
You’re comparing apples and oranges here.
Independently of the operating system , your 70g process might have an actual working set of 70 g, while the 55g might have had a working set of 1 gig.
Furthermore your Vm was running most likely in a shared environment, your swap partition running on shared not super fast io, etc - you may not even have had 64g of ram ( despite your Vm claiming the contrary ). Your Mac on the contrary, has what is says it has.
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