Wierdness with Windows XP 64-bit edition

[Frank]

Linux tries to maximise the use of all the available memory to improve performance dynamically (therefore most or all your memory will be used if there is something that might benefit from that, like drive caches), but Windows doesn't seem to have such a mechanism, it just keeps all memory that had been allocated by applications "alive", needed or not.

 

[KimB]

Linux tries to maximise the use of all the available memory to improve performance dynamically (therefore most or all your memory will be used if there is something that might benefit from that, like drive caches), but Windows doesn't seem to have such a mechanism, it just keeps all memory that had been allocated by applications "alive", needed or not.

Windows does also have what it calls a "system cache." Mine is currently sitting at 1.38GB used. The only thing that I know of that this does is cache hard drive accesses.

 

[Frank]

Windows does also have what it calls a "system cache." Mine is currently sitting at 1.38GB used. The only thing that I know of that this does is cache hard drive accesses.

Yes. But there is no mechanism that balances the use of memory dynamically to speed up anything that might benefit, and reclaims that when it is needed by applications. Or at least not to that extend, the disk cache is the only thing, and it's not very dynamic. When memory is allocated, it generally stays allocated, and the free memory available is not distributed actively.