800+ IT
News
als RSS Feed abonnieren📚 A Discussion on RAM Usage Amounts
💡 Newskategorie: Linux Tipps
🔗 Quelle: reddit.com
Many people in the Windows world will tell you that Windows XP was one of the absolute best Windows OSes ever released, notably due to it being packed with features while requiring VERY little system resources. Specifically, assuming you had the max 4 GB of RAM on the 32-bit version of XP, it would use only ~105 MB of that. If you put some RAM pressure on the OS, it would scale down even more to ~75 MB. Ever since Vista's release though, that number skyrocketed all the way up to ~850 MB with 4 GB of RAM with it scaling down to its lowest of ~215 MB when memory pressure is applied.
Now, I know exactly what everyone's going to type now. RAM was not nearly as plentiful back then as it is now, and free RAM is unused RAM, which is actually bad because it's not getting used to its fullest potential. Don't worry, I understand. Nevertheless, it does bring up a question though of if Linux can reach those legendary XP numbers on the relevant lightweight distros.
For example, if we look at TinyCore (Plus edition) running on a Live USB on a system with 4 GB of RAM, we get a total RAM usage of 135 MB on idle. Now, compared to any other distro, this is damn good for sure, but TinyCore is pretty much as limited as you can get while still running a GUI of some kind. If we go one step up to Puppy Linux, again on the same system with the same parameters, we get a total RAM usage of 185 MB. Still great, but not able to touch XP's numbers.
Now, what is quite pleasant to find is that if we go all the way to the other end of the spectrum, looking at the full-featured mainstream distros, the RAM usage at idle doesn't actually increase that much at all, and ESPECIALLY compared to Windows 10 (ugh). PopOS is the heaviest here at 675 MB at idle compared to the ridiculous ~1.2 GB that Windows 10 (build 2004) uses. Even with everything at its leanest, the best Windows 10 can do is ~700 MB, and at that amount, it was practically dying.
Anyway though. Has Linux (or at least the major Linux distros) gotten just a little too bloated? Can we learn anything from Windows XP? Or is this RAM usage ultimately inescapable in this day and age?
[link] [comments] ...