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I work in tech, and I don’t understand people’s obsession with having all their RAM free at all times.

If you don’t use it, why do you have it?

Windows (not the best OS, but the one I know the most about), will lie to you about how much memory you have that’s free. It puts data in RAM as cache. In the event you need that data, it’s already loaded in RAM. Usually this is stuff like DLLs and executables for programs.

There’s a difference between “free” memory, and “available” memory.

Linux and macOS do the same, although I wouldn't call it lying per se :)

There is certainly a lack of understanding of the difference between free and available RAM. TLDR: yes, free RAM is indeed wasted RAM.

If you actually have a lot of free RAM, it's probably because you either booted or freed a lot of RAM very recently. After using your computer for a while, most of your available RAM should not be free but rather being used for page cache and other caches.

After a program has just read and/or written more data from disk than will fit in available RAM, the kernel's page cache (which is typically the bulk of that not-free-but-available memory) should be mostly populated by the most recent of those operations. This means that if that program (or any other program) reads those files again, before they are evicted from cache by other things, they will not need to wait for the disk and will get them back much faster.

However, managing all of this is the kernel's job, and the not-free-but-available RAM being used for page cache is not (in any OS, as far as I know, though I mostly know Linux) attributed to the program(s) responsible for putting things there.

So, when people are complaining about an application using 40% of their RAM it is not necessarily due to them misunderstanding free-vs-available RAM. The used number for an application does not include the portion of the system's not-free-but-available RAM which the application is also responsible for occupying.

(If you want to know which programs and/or which files are responsible for occupying your page cache... on Linux at least, it is not really possible without instrumenting your kernel. There are a variety of tools that let you see which blocks of a given file are cached, but there isn't a reverse mapping from blocks to files.)

Use all the RAM you want, but if another program needs it give it back ffs!

For me there are programs that "can acceptably use that much RAM" and those that it's "unacceptable", to me. what's 20% to 40% of my gaming rig's resources may be uncomfortably taxing and laggy for my laptop. Its okay to waste resources on my gaming rig but the laptop needs all it can get. I accept some software will not reasonably run on the laptop. My employer has stuck me on 10yo hardware before, running windows 10 pro + intrusive expensive antivirus and nobody is around to question why their computers are getting 5-15fps and locking up for a minute or two when you open chrome. It becomes normal. Any software is the host and/or backbone for other running software should focus on reducing it's own resource usage for the sake of its children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm

Me when I take a joke seriously.

counterpoint: why does it need to keep the tabs in ram? either just discard the data and only keep the url, or if it would otherwise double check whether you want to close a tab then save things to disk cache after 5 minutes..

Exatcly do it correctly and use multiple browsers each for a very specific type of work/thing you do you animals.

Source: https://xenia.chimmie.k.vu/ (She has more art, I recommend checking it)

Not only that, but the character in that profile pic often sprouts cat ears when she has strong feelings.

Most browsers these days have issues with high RAM usage, and memory leaks to. I'd recommend trying to limit the RAM of the browser, it stops it from eating up so much.

Here's how I did it on linux. I'm sure there's a way to do it if you're on Windows though (might not be as good though).

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Firefox RAM limit 8GB
GenericName=Firefox Ram limit 8GB
Comment=Limit RAM for Firefox to 8GB;
Exec=systemd-run --user --scope -p MemoryLimit=8G firefox
Icon=firefox
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;Development;
StartupWMClass=Firefox

This is a script to limit Firefox to 8 gigabytes of RAM, you may change it lower or higher depending on what your needs are by changing the number from 8 to whatever else you'd like. Fair warning though setting it too low will cause Firefox to lag very badly, and will crash chromium browsers outright (Ask me how I found out).

The whole RAM thing is way overblown. Both browsers request a lot of RAM allocation, but only actually use a fraction of it. When the OS needs it for another process this "allocated, but unused" pool is the first to get used when "Free and unallocated" is gone

Problem is windows reports it all as the same in the task manager so people see that "70%" usage and freak out.

Tl:Dr Windows task manager is a fuckin lier.