Comment by wahern
1 day ago
Doesn't Windows, like macOS, automatically expand swap? You can't run out of memory nearly as quickly as you can on Linux. And at least on Windows I always figured this is why it felt so sluggish under load--it ends up paging alot. Not sure why macOS has always felt more consistent; perhaps the OS and major apps are less gratuitous memory hogs?
If you're referring to Apple Silicon, my intuition is that the SoC design allows for higher bandwidth between SSD and RAM which reduces the performance impact of paging. I might be totally wrong though