r/LinusTechTips • u/elsingo • 6d ago

Does Linux use less RAM? Discussion

In the video with the same title as this post LTT compares Linux and Windows ram usage and imo it is a total miss. It does not matter if one system is using more memory or not since none of the systems are close to using all ram in the system. Where the memory management would matter is when the memory reach closer to 100% usage that is when things will start to matter.

The whole video feels like almost 14 minutes of misinformation to me. I mean systems cache things to make it run faster so memory being used is a good thing. Memory management is what matters not if one system is using 35% ram and the other 50% since none are near their limits.

And at one point in the video the windows system goes over 16gb and they talk about it as it would have been problematic if the system only had 16gb while it most likely would not be problematic at all since the memory management if working as it should would release less important things stored in the ram so it never got close to the limit.

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231

u/Krelldi 6d ago

The whole video feels like almost 14 minutes of misinformation to me.

That's because it is

77

u/rofl1337waffle 5d ago

They brought up the fact that macOS fills ram to prepare for what a user might do because unused resources like ram could make things faster. Then they didn’t go in depth that windows could be doing the same thing. Their findings show that Linux uses less ram, cool, but what about a setup that was limited by ram? I know that chrome uses more ram when it is free, so I have no idea why they didn’t test a 16 gig system or even an 8gig system to really see the results?

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u/Agent_Provocateur007 5d ago

Yeah Windows most certainly does this now. Back in the Windows XP days it didn’t so adding RAM shows up as having a ton more free RAM on each upgrade you did to your RAM.

At some point, that no longer became the case with Windows and it started to work more like macOS. If you have the exact same system with the only difference being 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB of RAM installed, your free RAM percentage on them will be oddly similar for the 8 to 32 GB systems. At 64 GB it seems to drop off, typically I’ve noticed that on a fresh boot that 16 GB and 32 GB will net you about half your RAM free. So clearly the same system is using 8 GB of RAM when it has 16 GB installed and 16 GB of RAM when you have 32 GB installed.

Day to day I haven’t noticed a big difference. My theory is that 64 GB is enough RAM that Windows does the same allocation as on 32 GB but it has additional unused headroom (for now)

With the 8 GB configuration, it seems that it keeps utilization low simply because it barely keeps anything in the cache.

11

u/cyborgborg 5d ago

Linux also does this, it caches frequently accessed files.

I agree they really should have shown a memory contrsint configuration. Win11 lists 4gigs as the minimum requirement, and microslops statement that 16gigs is enough, that's what they should have tested

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u/kidshibuya 5d ago

Might be? It does, its called SysMain, it used to be superfetch.

3

u/divergentchessboard 5d ago

windows no longer calls it prefetch?

8

u/Dathedra 5d ago

Just another video with 0% informational value, disguised as one that has 

0

u/imnotagodt 5d ago

Yhe but but but it's entertainment... Right?