Comment by Borg3
1 day ago
Borg3 slaps foldr with a spinning rust.
And now more seriously ;) Swapping aint fun. Sure, if it needs to happen, its better that out of memory error or crash, but still. Its not excuse to baloon everything..
And here, is my memory stats, while writing reply:
Commit: 288.13M (1%); Free Memory: 15.43G (96%)
Swapping is perfectly fine for the case where an app that has remained unused for a significant period of time starts being used again. It may even be faster than having the app manually release all of the memory it’s allocated and then manually reallocating it all again on user input (which is presumably what the alternative would be, if the complaint is only about the app’s memory usage when in an inactive state).
Free RAM is just RAM that’s doing nothing useful. Better to fill it with cached application states until you run out.
An application that genuinely uses less RAM at any point of its execution, whether that's measured by maximum RSS, average RSS, whatever, is still better. Then you can have more apps running at the same level of swapping. It's true that if you have a lot of free RAM, there's no need to split hairs. But what about when you don't have a lot? I was under the impression that computers should handle a billion Chrome tabs easily. Or like, y'know, workloads that people actually use that aren't always outlandish stress tests.
Sure, the ideal app uses no resources. But it really doesn’t matter how much allocated memory an app retains when in an unused state (if you’re running it on a modern multitasking OS). If there’s any memory pressure then those pages will get swapped out or compressed, and you won’t really notice because you’re not using the app.
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