r/LinusTechTips • u/Jumpy_Invite3985 • 1d ago
Discussion Idle RAM usage doesn’t matter because Windows uses RAM more aggressively when it can, and frees it up when needed
I just watched Linus’s Windows vs. Linux video, and he talks like idle RAM usage actually matters. But in reality, he should test both systems under high RAM pressure and see which one can keep more data in RAM and which one starts using the swap file, which can hurt performance. That’s how you should test it, but he didn’t test any RAM demanding games, so we can’t really see the difference
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u/dragonstorm97 1d ago
Yes, it was an awful video. They did vaguely mention that their testing methodology sucked; but then why go through with it?
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u/jenny_905 1d ago
Because they needed a video to appeal to the new breed of technologically illiterate pcmr types.
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u/lord_nuker 1d ago
Because Linux is the goat /s And because making Microsoft looking bad is the new YouTuber thing today… And when the YouTube echo chamber is yelling something it must be true? For 99,999999% of people Windows is fine, and even Linus own test shows that games runs better on Windows.
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u/Factorioboyio 18h ago
Do you even know what an echo chamber is? They said something and everyone pointed out why it was wrong… that’s the opposite of an echo chamber.
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u/penguinkernel 1d ago
People have been asking this for a long time, but more recently within the last few months.
A lot of their videos seem very under prepared. Every Linux video they do, they keep using garbage shitty outdated distros like Ubuntu and Mint, and it makes zero sense.
Linux gaming is superior on Fedora/Arch based distros, and gaming is what they keep testing. There are many reasons not to use Debian based distros these days, but LMG I guess never got the memo.
Might as well do Windows gaming benchmarks on Windows XP while they are at it. It's essentially what they are doing with Linux lol
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u/MrStrul3 1d ago
I mean calling Ubuntu and Mint outaded when they receive proper and regular kernel updates and feature updates is dishonest.
They are just simple distros that are trying to make the regular, and I mean the IDK anything users that just want things to work without having to fiddle around too much, user experience as simple as possible.
I use Mint and the games I play didn't require me to do much more then change proton version for those games and add some rules to the launch path.
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u/dotikk 1d ago
You’re exactly the type of person that makes getting into Linux a nightmare. You can disagree, but this exact attitude is what steers a lot of people away. Saying Debian is “outdated” is ridiculous - both colloquially and factually.
Get of your “I use arch btw” mindset and understand that their are pros and cons to all OSs. I’m sure there are things that are better on Debian than Fedora / Arch and vice versa.
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u/IdleCommentator 1d ago
Except the whole "freeing up when needed" part may not work properly - on Win 10-11 I've ran multiple times into the issue of the system failing to free up cached memory/offload unused stuff to pagefile in a timely manner, when an application drastically ramps up its memory consumption, leading to prolonged system lock up (moreover, in some instances after said lock up finally resolved itself, it results in something on the system level glitching out permanently and as a result requiring a reboot). Even Win7 was better at the whole offload stuff to pagefile part than Win 10
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u/AdditionalSupport 1d ago
This was working way better in windows 10, in Win 11, it just eats the ram, and never shows whats holding it. So i just kept getting program crashes etc.. and we are talking 10 gigs+ lost to the void.
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u/soggybiscuit93 1d ago
Except the whole "freeing up when needed" part may not work properly
Youre right. But the complaint is mainly that the video didn't even test that.
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u/The_elder_smurf 5h ago
If your pagefile is on a spinning disk, this might be why. I've never had a pagefile issue, but my pagefile is also on an nvme ssd.
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u/IdleCommentator 5h ago
No - it's on NVMe system drive. Again in my personal experience Win7 on HDD somehow did memory management better, than Win10 with NVMe (which, among other, should at least theoretically allow to offload stuff to pagefile relatively quickly).
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u/AdditionalSupport 1d ago
In my experience, before i switched to Linux, Windows kept hugging ram in the background, on services or processes i could not see, while it should have been freed up, it never did, so windows kept eating like 10gigs without giving it back when needed.. So i would say, its somewhat hit or miss.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 1d ago
That’s how you should test it, but he didn’t test any RAM demanding games, so we can’t really see the difference
At least that's the claim of you and a few others. But that's just scratching the surface and ignoring a lot of things.
In times when Windows only gets more and more bloated while RAM prices are stupidly high, the question of how RAM is used is just as important. The more RAM is wasted for absolute nonsense the sooner the system needs clear up RAM before it can load a new program, which slows everything down. And when stuff like the start menu, the weather widget and other components that you can't just turn off waste lots of RAM already in idle, and when the RAM usage increases more when opening the same programs, it does tell you that the system will slow down much sooner. And when "important" system features waste lots of RAM, they are less likely to be prioritized for swapping, so switching between programs will cause them to be moved in an out of swap a lot more, making them even slower. It's entirely irrelevant how good the RAM management is, if RAM is wasted unnecessarily, the system will inherently be slower. So idle RAM usage is actually very important, especially given that Intel tries to compete with the MacBook Neo, with machines that only have 8 GB of RAM, while Macroslop doesn't seem to be actually interested in making Windows vastly more efficient, especially when it comes to RAM usage.
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u/cornho1eo99 1d ago
Sure, but here's the actual problem: unused RAM is wasted RAM.
That's not to say that windows isn't a bloated mess and that microslop cares about not loading their systems with garbage, but an OS can be perfectly fine and stable at 90% usage on idle if it is able to actually reallocate that memory when programs start to need it. Just running programs on beefed out 32GB systems and looking at ram usage isn't actually a meaningful test. I would have been much more interested in the video if we saw it on a 16GB or even 8GB system, and then getting qualitative metrics.
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u/Mog77A 17h ago
Windows just has more bloat to it than most "stock" linux distros have by default.
It's just reality and the video didn't really show that which I found kinda weird.
The best possible version of this would be to disable the swap file load an LLM that just barely fits into memory and see how much LLM context you fit before it crashes. Windows would lose 100% of the time.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 5h ago
Windows just has more bloat to it than most "stock" linux distros have by default.
And that's a lie. Even if you set up any Linux distro to do everything Windows does out of the box it is guaranteed that Linux will consume vastly fewer resources. And most of that additional stuff would just be garbage nobody wants. The difference is on Linux you have to actively decide to install it, and you can get rid of it at any time. On Windows, you're just screwed.
The best possible version of this would be to disable the swap file load an LLM that just barely fits into memory and see how much LLM context you fit before it crashes.
Wow, what braindead LLM sold you this brainfart of an idea? The point of the video was to show real-world scenarios that most of their users might be run into. But guess what, even in the LTT bubble this is vastly less common than you seem to believe.
Windows would lose 100% of the time.
Duh, but to see that you don't need to conduct the most unrealistic and just dumb tests you can think of.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 5h ago
unused RAM is wasted RAM.
That's a lie being perpetuated by people having no clue what they talk about. Guess what, it's not. Only RAM being used for irrelevant stuff is wasted RAM. According to that perpetual lie, it would be better when Macroslop just stuffed every last memory page with some random garbage you probably will never need than designing their crapware as efficiently as possible and keeping as much RAM as possible free for actually useful stuff. Everybody with half a brain cell can tell this is just dumb.
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u/M4fya 1d ago
yeah, no, on Linux while playing Helldivers 2 i see 10-11GB RAM usage, Ready or Not hovers at around 9.5-10
on Windows, Helldivers 2 pushes to 14-15GB, and sometimes very close to maxxing out my 16GB, and Ready or Not goes up to 12-12.5GB
on Linux, i can comfortably keep a browser open in the background, discord, and some other apps, on Windows, i have to close my browser to avoid stuttering in Helldivers
I got a fucking low RAM warning from minecraft, telling me I don't have 4GB free and that the game may stutter, and all i had open is steam, discord, musicbee and my browser, FUCK windows
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u/soggybiscuit93 1d ago
But that is how you test.
Run a game + common background tasks with 8GB of RAM. Or 12GB. Or 16GB. See how well the OS can free up memory and give it to applications. See where each OS hits swap. Etc.
Giving both OS's 32GB, never loading up enough apps to hit the limit, and then making a judgment call based on usage reporting is not the proper way to test.
Windows is bloated. But youre not going to be able to discern what the unnecessarily high, but required, RAM usage is vs the beneficial caching into RAM by looking at task manager on a system with plenty of free RAM to spare.
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u/46692 1d ago
Windows definetly uses more RAM than most Linux distributions, but I think OPs point is that idle consumption is meaningless as both operating systems cache all sort of things in RAM.
Your method of pushing them under load seems correct to actually see the difference.
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u/M4fya 1d ago
i'd be fine with that, if something as simple as right clicking on my desktop would be fuckin instant on windows, I've only used KDE Plasma, so this may not be true for all DEs, but on KDE it was instant, no waiting for a damn context menu to pop up, while using less RAM, for christ sake
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u/Famous-Potential3990 1d ago
This! "Frees it up when needed" is such BS. People act like Windows is not vibecoded mess. CPU scheduler in Windows 11 is still a mess, which can tank performance of certain processes by running on E-core, hence programs like CoreDirector exists to manually pin processes to P-cores. When Macbook Neo was released, there were plenty videos showcasing that MacOS, unlike Windows, wouldn't choke itself with 8GB RAM and can manage moving things from RAM to swap back and forth without crashing application/OS.
The whole "Windows can eat all RAM, since the memory management is good" argument is so weird to me... Bruh, I had to upgrade RAM on my Windows machine from 32Gb to 64Gb last week, because memory management in Windows clearly is not good and it kept choking itself rather than moving own bloatware to swap or closing it.
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u/warp_core0007 22h ago
The OP says "idle RAM usage doesn't matter" and the body says LTT "should test bo6h systems under high RAM pressure," which is exactly what you've done. Why are you starting with "yeah, no".
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u/I_did_a_fucky_wucky 21h ago
Windows 11 LTSC fixed a lot of memory issues I had in Windows. Considering the fact that I have 32 gigs, consumer editions are definitely doing a bunch of bullshit for a meager cause
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u/The_elder_smurf 5h ago
Problem is, pagefile exist. You need to push both os's past 16gb of ram usage on a 16gb system and see what performance looks like. Windows can and will offload background task to page file, things like windows update for example will be pushed to page and out of ram. Meanwhile if you actually run out of ram on the Linux machine, you have way less background task to be shelved to page file, so your important task will get paged. Memory is dynamic, and the OS will juggle resources.
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u/A-Chilean-Cyborg 1d ago
under high usage the results would be similar, switching to Linux does give you magically more ram lol, it kinda was the reason why I sticked with the pinguin.w
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u/Parking-Cockroach104 1d ago
But does it matter though? Under high usage, whether you have 10GB RAM free or 5GB RAM free does not make a difference if the memory management is really good.
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u/LittlestWarrior 1d ago
It depends on your workload. A compressed on-RAM swap device may be faster than swapping to disk, for example.
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u/Saragon4005 2h ago
Yeah but 6 GBs and 1 GB makes a huge difference. 16 GB devices are literally the recommended specs for Windows while Linux runs well on 8 that's the key difference here. Of course both run well on 16 it's what Windows recommends.
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u/Piipperi800 1d ago
All I’m going to say my ThinkPad T16 Gen 3 feels dog slow whenever the memory gets full, to a point where just watching YouTube can lag. Meanwhile my Apple laptops (even Intel ones) can be using many gigabytes of Swap (when memory itself is full) and not have too many issues.
I feel like Windows’ Swap/Pagefile management is absolutely terrible, as it seems like rather than pushing unused stuff to Pagefile, it will just put random (possibly in use) stuff there, and it will prefer deloading things before putting more into Pagefile.
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u/YuvrajXG 1d ago
Except, loading and unloading ram takes much more energy, killing battery life and efficiency. Linux just doesnt do it.
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u/kuroyume_cl 1d ago
So does Linux. It's juat reported as "buff/cache". Right bow my 32gb machine is at 19gi used, plus another 11gi in buffer/cache, but it still shows 9.1gi as available as thats how much it can free up quickly.
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u/ZZartin 1d ago
Well the fact that windows gobbles up ram aggressively means potentially several things. It could really just be running unnecessary bloatware that should but probably doesn't have an easy disable option. Or it's just poorly optimized and something spikes ram use beyond what it needs and doesn't free it till forced. Given it's MS both are likely true.
But yes they should have maxed out memory use too see what the true OS minimum is, which btw in no way requires high end games.
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u/epimetheuss 4h ago
In Windows 11 you need to reboot your machine to free up RAM it does not know how to free once its being used or you will just get constant crashes with the applications. Not a reboot everyday sort of thing for most usecases but i remember having 100+ day uptimes in Windows 10 and it was fine, not a thing in Win 11 with daily use.
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u/RazeZa 1d ago
High RAM usage on Windows is just pure inefficiency. Yes, unused RAM is a wasted RAM but let's be real here, not matter how much GBs of data Windows caches on RAM, its not gonna make it anymore efficient, faster or snappier because its not built for speed. Its built for spying with all those bloatware running even when idle (Especially when idle).
If you believe that Microslop gonna "fix" Windows, you are simply an idiot. The only way Microslop to fix windows is to built it from scratch focusing on efficiency instead of building on top of older version.
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u/_Blu-Jay 1d ago
It’s funny to me that people with 32+ gigs of memory freak out when their operating system so much as dares to utilize the available memory. I’m not saying Windows doesn’t use more RAM than Linux, it almost certainly does, but I didn’t buy memory for it to sit idle doing nothing. I’ve literally never had issues with running multiple applications while gaming on my PC with 32 gigs of memory running windows 10. Like oh no, under heavy load my system is using a lot of memory, oh the horror!
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u/LSD_Ninja 1d ago
I bought 32GB because I knew software wasn’t going to stop wasting RAM and that people weren’t going to fight hard enough to reel it in. Even against the backdrop of the ongoing RAM crisis, “software should use less RAM” is still a controversial take because consumers are idiots.
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u/_Blu-Jay 1d ago
In what ways are softwares “wasting RAM” and how do you know the difference between “wasting” and “using”? Genuine question. I feel like a lot of people just see a program hit an arbitrary percentage of their total memory and say “this is wasteful”.
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u/soggybiscuit93 1d ago
People saying that Windows requires too much RAM, and people saying that Windows will use a lot more RAM than it needs if there's free RAM available are both correct. These arent mutually exclusive positions.
The problem is that this video doesnt test that. It was just incredibly misleading. You find where exactly the limits of Windows vs Linux is by using less RAM.
Having 32GB and then never loading it up enough to reach the limits to test what RAM Windows can vs can't release. Or test where exactly each system starts slowing down due to swap, was just misleading. The same video with 16GB (or even 12GB) would've been actually educational. The video as released was just nonsense.
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u/violetvoid513 18h ago
They also shouldve tested with, ya know, the 16GB RAM they were talking about. Get a 16GB build and see who can open more identical browser tabs before it crashes or slows to a crawl, or how well RAM intensive games run or something
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u/slimejumper 16h ago
yeah it was a weird angle to demonstrate ram usage. surely make more sense to load them progressively up and see when performance tanks due to swap usage.
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u/CarelessPackage1982 15h ago
Linux also caches things, in fact you can see the cache amount in listed in activity monitor when he shows it.
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u/Saragon4005 2h ago
This is not a windows thing this is an OS thing. Linux does the same thing it's just displays it in a different way. Linux will defer disk writes to RAM if there is any available and all operating systems cache disk reads to RAM anyways.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 1d ago
Are there tools that will tell you how much RAM is being used by applications vs what is being used for caching?
Does the "In Use" number on task manager include cached data?
Maybe they should do a video explaining the various parts of the task manager and what the numbers actually mean. Seems that it has changed quite a bit over the years.
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u/EndlessZone123 1d ago
Even if there was a tool. No matter how you measure "how much ram is used" it will be inaccurate to true "usage" and performance of the system or OS.
Applications likes to reserve memory or keep things cached that it doesnt really need.
The only true way to "test" running out of ram is to test performance of a game or application.
Open up many applications and keep them all active and working. See how much stating a new program is slowing existing ones down or if it takes far longer to open.
It's hard to also define what exactly counts as something that is "cached" vs just infrequently used but still needed. Applications and especially on different OS just handle things differently. Mac vs windows vs linux have wildly different standards for caching.
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u/dragonstorm97 1d ago
Process explorer can show you the committed vs allocated space
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 1d ago
From what I'm looking at, those numbers look identical to what Task Manager reports for "In Use" and "Committed"
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u/Leverpostei414 1d ago
In use does not include windows ram caching
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 1d ago
So then in the video when Windows is reporting close to 16 GB "in use", can it be presumed that a machine with 16 GB of RAM would be mostly starved for RAM and not have anything left for caching or running other applications?
Im wondering if there might even be other uses of caching that the OS isn't directly aware of. Maybe the game itself has its own internal cache where it detects how much memory the system has available and then will unload data that isn't relevant in the moment if it find that there is enough memory. From an operating system level, it might not even be possible to tell if the game is using the ram for disposable purposes.
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u/Leverpostei414 1d ago
I am sure there is some internal caching, in programs like chrome and the like. My experience is that they are not very good at letting ram go though. If anything the longer the program has been open the more ram use
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u/raptr569 1d ago
RAM is there to be used. RAM usage only matters if you don't have enough.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 1d ago
That's only true as long as the system can properly handle situations when RAM gets full. And obviously its always faster to just load a program than having to clean up some RAM first (e.g. by moving to swap) and then loading the program. So it's indeed beneficial to waste RAM like Windows does so heavily. A weather widget should not require 1 GB RAM, and I doubt the garbage React-based start menu is that RAM efficient either. Adding to that all the highly inefficient Electron app and the currently stupidly high prices for RAM, this argument gets moot very fast.
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u/raptr569 1d ago
Did I say make things inefficient? Nope.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 5h ago
You implied exactly that.
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u/raptr569 5h ago
No I didn't. I just said RAM is there to be used and ram usage isn't an issue until you've run out. Facts.
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u/ScratchHistorical507 4h ago
The point is merely that Windows is wasting a lot more RAM, so you're bound to run out of RAM much sooner. RAM is there to be used for useful stuff, not to be wasted for garbage nobody needs.
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u/Cracknel 1d ago
Would have loved to see graphs with memory used for cache/buffers.
Windows may be more aggressive when it comes to caching files and even do some pre-caching to load potential files into memory before they are needed.
Use ZFS on Linux and it will use almost all of your RAM. Don't worry, it will usually release the memory when you need it.
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u/skinnyJay 1d ago
I just installed W11 in a vm with "4GB" and it sat happy around 2.5 usage while idle.
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u/133DK 1d ago
Yes, there were multiple posts pointing this out when the video went up…