@0xabad1dea The RAM use thing is an older paradigm from when nobody had enough RAM to run the latest Windows OS smoothly, and applications had to free up memory constantly by pushing active memory to disks.

Conversely, the abundance of cheap RAM in more recent years has enabled certain software developers to become sloppy with their own housekeeping, and just never offload anything.

@0xabad1dea I’ve had many conversations with ops people about memory alerting on my database servers.

“Do you want this alert threshold at 80%?”
“No, I don’t care about memory alerting. Just alert if there’s excess swap.”
“But you also want to know if it’s out of RAM right?”
“If we’re using all the RAM without swap, this means we’re tuned optimally. Just alert on excess swap usage.”

@0xabad1dea well, if you have 48G of ram your it mostly stay 50% free, 25% in active use and 25% in cache.

Typical workload was a few VS code, 2 chrome profile, firefox and some kubernetes stuff

@0xabad1dea thankyou.gif

Also, your browser is making your computer cry mostly because of horrible websites with terrible JavaScript.

@0xabad1dea on #linux, with

% echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

as root one can experience this hands on

@0xabad1dea the thing is: there are much more efficient ways of caching out things than just RAM - and there are certain things that Do Not require excessive caching yet are accumulated in the RAM counterpart anyways. ~1/0.7gb on a idle occasion without anything else being computed other than the interface of an application should Not be a standard in most occasions (development environments as a notable example are an exemption to this rule as they also handle inner logic to make your experience while coding more interactive and intuitive).

the processing unit and the drives storing your tasks can handle a lot of things and under no surprise is how various popular things from the past worked.

@0xabad1dea my issue is that it seems to fail frequently in ways that noticable affect system performance. I've always assumed it was trying to cache things...but something is off about the priority. When the computer reboots and loads all of my major programs in under a minute, how much more caching do I really need?

On windows systems with 48-64GB of ram I had to reboot once or twice a week because I've had it bog down and appear to use a page file on hard drive (which I wish it never did on SSD). RAM will 90%+ used, but if I tally up individual programs it will be closer to 25%. I assume this is primarily OS then, although individual programs could be aggravating the caching system.

Linux has been smoother and less frequent problems...but I still catch browser suddenly asking for 32+GB of ram and suddenly stuff like X and bash crash from out of memory issues while browser keeps allocating. (I realize this is what I would get if I force no page file...).

@0xabad1dea

always seems to use 80-90% of the ram no matter how much ram you install is that the computer understands empty ram doesn't do anything but ram being used to cache files

I don't know how it works on Windows, but I've never seen caching reported by the OS as memory that is in use. The memory reported as "free" is what is used as cache.

@0xabad1dea

True. But also, your computer can feel very sluggish and stuttery after completing a kernel build for a minute or so. Your load (the kernel build) likely caused the running kernel to drop many cached filesystem blocks from the vfs cache, so it can take a bit of time to page them back in. On modern kit, the user probably won't notice much though due to fast SSD and fast I/O. But, it was defintely noticeable on older kit.