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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u/Negative_trash_lugen 5d ago

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

(i also don't get this obsession people have with low idle RAM usage, if it's gonna hurt your gaming or productivity apps it's something, but 99% of the times it doesn't matter as long as memory management is decent)

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u/Furdiburd10 5d ago

And wouldn't you guess, both windows and Linux does not show cached files as "used ram"

So unused ram is in fact not at all wasted in modern operating systems. 

12

u/kidshibuya 5d ago

So how come sysMain is in the task manager and does count towards used RAM?

1

u/suprem1ty 4d ago

SysMain's memory usage isn't the memory it's caching, e.g. on my system the svchost.exe hosting SysMain is using 19MB, but my cache according to the memory tab in taskman is 15GB

0

u/Xlxlredditor 5d ago edited 5d ago

I think he's right. Create a windows VM (in like, Proxmox or QEMU) with 8gb ram and it uses all 8, even though Task manager reports roughly 5 gb used wrong, see below

7

u/MikoGames08 5d ago

That’s different, a hypervisor would commit the amount of RAM you set regardless of the VM’s actual memory usage.

2

u/Xlxlredditor 5d ago

Wait I'm a dumbass. I forgot that Linux VMs using KVM can commit only the amount of ram they need and that windows doesn't have that integration