smellycoat

Khoo and the Gang

The skookumest choocher on the interwebs

It's rarely actually idle, though. Every time your system needs to read data from storage, it typically reads more than it needs (it has to read in blocks, so unless the data you want is exactly aligned with the block it'll read more than necessary).

Your system keeps those read blocks in memory, using any space that isn't already in use by applications. Since it's generally a reasonable bet that if you might need that data again (or you might need other data that happened to be in those blocks), the OS already has it there waiting for you in your spare RAM, significantly speeding up interaction.

Idle RAM isn't necessarily wasted RAM.

Are you not allowed to lift your head at all?

I was stuck in bed with back problems for a while and couldn't lift my head for days. The relief was immense when I could.

Am I helping?

Because even with 2gb of RAM, browser memory usage is a problem for me, with both Firefox and Chrome.

Firefox is currently chewing up 614MB, with three open tabs (it's probably been running for a couple of days, though). Thunderbird is using 156MB, and I'm running a few other things in the 50MB range.

From looking at my task manager, I can see that the copy of Photoshop I opened up this morning has now swapped itself out (likely because of Firefox's memory usage - I haven't done much else since I opened Photoshop). That means if I click on it, I'm going to have to endure 30 seconds of grinding before I can start actually using it.

I have no issue with things using lots of RAM if I make them do stuff. If I open 50 tabs in Firefox I fully expect it to chew up a ton of RAM. That's cool. My issue is that it doesn't give it back when it's finished with it.

Chrome is a better model when it comes to RAM usage and will return most of it to the OS when it's done. But that model is more memory hungry (ie, the limit to how much I can do at once before my system starts to suffer is lower than with Firefox).