Linux has long had better memory management compared to not just Windows, but a number of other OSs. I know Linus and the Kernel crew were somewhat obsessive about memory management and making sure things used memory efficiently. At one point, I was working for a company in Montreal, and they had been running a Web based JAVA application on (at the time) Sun's Solaris, and were constantly have problems with stability, which we traced to memory. Back then, Sun Workstation memory was very expensive, so I said, let's try putting Linux on the same workstation, and see how the app runs since I knew that Linux was better with memory management. I prepared a Sun workstation that we had laying around as a spare with Linux, and all the appropriate software...and sure enough, it was totally stable, and our QA people tested it and they found it stable, and faster as well through their entire test suite. What I didn't tell them is that the workstation I had used had only half the memory the big server the software was going to run on! BTW, that's a nice view of the Parliamentry LIbarary in Ottawa in the background!
I was amused when toying with Illumos recently (a fork of OpenSolaris) in a VM with 4 GB RAM, just running "sudo pkg update" on a fresh install caused the package manager to run out of memory. Though it turns out it was partly my fault - Solaris wanted to use part of the hard disk as swap, but my VM was already running out of disk space. Still, you'd think 4 GB of memory would be enough memory to run the package manager. I note that it's written in Python, which I'm normally a big fan of, but obviously the pkg code needs a bit more work. Though admittedly this is all kind of an edge case, since if you really need to run the GUI version of Solaris in a production environment you'd want to run it on bare metal.
what a joke better memory management? this topic keep exists. Ram comsumption always equal to feature that os give. what a joke compare ram usage after reboot. Windows include good looking animation, anti-virus (bitdefender). if u look in ram usage of application. it totally no different. it just different in reboot. Ram already cheap. so spend 2GB ram for OS. its not a big problem at now for so much feature that OS can give.
I have prepared Linux systems that run in 32MB of RAM (yes MB, not GB), with GUI and no swap. It wasn't meant for general usage (prepared using Yocto for medical devices), but gives an idea of what you can achieve. I felt like an artisan sculpting a gem. [EDIT] Clarification to address some random replies: The device was a medical device able to operate without interruptions for years if necessary, the last test I know it was operating for 6 months w/o interruption, but years was the target, and had to support OTA and operate with no swap. The UI was touch driven and responsive, IEC 62366-2 certified. I'm sure that there are other options in the market, but I doubt many tick so many boxes. And yes, a version of Windows for Devices, Windows Embedded or WIndows IOT (or whatever name it has today) was part of the platform set evaluated by the customer.
Ya.... and to point out, you built it for a singular model of hw, for a very very very selective set of things. Linux is awesome for that, but don't get it twisted..... that isn't compatible with you normal desktip user.
This is yet another reason to love Linux, as it can make older hardware even those limited to to 4GB RAM usable, were as WIndows on the same hardware is a no go.
don't even need 4gbs or ram. if you download a minimum installation of arch linux for example and download a minimalistic window-manager or desktop-environment you can easily get away with 2gbs of ram.
I have an old Dell XPS 430 from 2009 lying around, on Windows 10 it seemed like it was dying. I install GNU/Linux in June & it's revived, now it runs Debian.
@@UltimusShadow. Debian is not bad, it just does not update fast enough for me, which is why I run Solus Linux which so far has been the most stable rolling release I've ran, and the only major issues I've had so far that were not my own fault, is I can't get the system fan in my 13in Mid-2012 Macbook pro to spin as fast as it should as MBPFan is not in the repos so it runs a little warm to the touch, but does not thermal throttle.
And that's with PopOs Gnome, which is kind of known as a ram hog in itself. I bet with KDE or Xfce the results would be even lower. But of course if we're only talking about raw ram usage numbers.
@@runed0s86 Because Pop!_OS what almost no other Linux based OS is. It's made by a company that installs it on their own computers to sell! That brings a quality of focus on the desktop Linux rarely seen among pet hobby distros. And it's improving rapidly every year.
If you have the ram for gnome, why not? Vanilla gnome is the best thing I’ve experienced in desktop environments. I prefer it over macos and kde. It definitely takes some time getting used to, but it is very much worth it. And yes, I am a (vanilla) gnome fanboy
Im currently using zram on a laptop with 2444mhz ram It doesnt really impact performance maybe 1-2% list but adds alot of virtual ram without killing my ssd 16 -> 24 with 1-2 ratio compression
interestingly Windows is really optimized on swapping to compensate that memory usage and prevents lockup or stall while Linux memory usage is low but when on high pressure memory usage and started to swap it tends to locks up (if you dont have the prelockd, nohang, le9 patch, etc..)
@@christianlockley2578 Rather than saying "Dude you know nothing", say "I disagree, this is why you are wrong..." and you go ahead and explain the right way of the architectural operations to prove him wrong.
@@DarkGT The problem is that what they said is just wrong. I agree that maybe saying "you don't know nothing" is harsh and quite frankly rude, but that still doesn't change the fact that the info is wrong, it's like if someone told you water boils at 50C, it just doesn't --there is nothing to explain.
A fun exercise. It should be said using more memory is not necessarily a bad thing. Memory if used to enhance speed it's a good thing, if a program is carrying unused baggage and making memory unavailable to others it's a bad thing.
I've seen others say Windows uses 4GB of RAM after boot but I've never seen it myself. I'm currently using 3.4GB out of 16GB, with two Firefox/UA-cam tabs open and 20hrs. uptime. It is worth noting I've seen both Windows and Linux use more RAM when more is available. With 4GB total Windows 10 will use 1.6GB after boot, compared to 2.4GB with 16GB total.
Yeah, it's weird. When I had just installed Windows 11 on my new PC it was using only 2-3 gigs of memory, but after installing all the apps and all the updates it started sitting at 5-6 gigs. Windows must be caching a crap ton of stuff. Honestly it doesn't matter much, unused RAM is useless RAM. And if that memory usage is for caching then I'm sure Windows can clear it when it actually needs to be used.
It will only use more than 4 GB of RAM on startup if it can. I am typing this right now, yes right now, on an HP Stream 7 with 1GB of Ram running Windows 10. Using more RAM On startup if available is a very good thing, it means the system is optimizing and prefetching programs you use so they run faster than better.
The way Windows reports used ram is interesting to say the least, as depending on if I enable or disable the onboard GPU on my CPU and which PCIe GPU (AMD or Nvidia both with 8GBS of Video ram) I fit I can get the same computer and Windows 10 build to report between 2GB's and 11GBs of used ram without running any application. This seems to be a result of how shared memory buffers for the GPUs both built in and PCIe are reported. As such the reported used or free ram may or may not reflect how much actual systems ram is being used and how efficient windows ram management is, and ,may be more down to how the GPU drivers are setup for the system you are looking at ;-)
High Windows RAM usage at bootup is most likely from Windows SuperFetch - the OS is filling up available RAM with whatever programs you would have last used, so they will open quicker.
Thanks Gary. Nice vid, the only thing one might be asking is WHY does windows use more than linux for the same program? Are there decisions made like "lets load the whole lot into ram so things load quicker when the user wants them..."
I noticed the difference with a 2016 laptop a little over 2 years ago. I couldn't even get windows 8.1 to load up Blender. It worked perfectly fine when using Linux mint. True I wasn't gong to be doing heavy tasks with it. As it was a entry level laptop. But been able to load it in the first place said it all.
8 channel ram is four times faster than dual channel ram. Quad channel ram is twice as fast as dual channel ram. Dual channel ram is faster than even a new NVMe storage drive and has way less latency. You guys are on a race to the bottom.
Actually, yeah, it'd be cool to make a video on how memory is actually organised and how the structural difference impacts the performance, especially before the systems starts swapping (which is obviously going to happen sooner with the Windows system, even cheating on the swappiness on the Linux system to force it swap earlier). Basically, if you had an infinite amount of RAM on either system, is one system more performant than the other?
From my humble point of view Gary's YT is the one of the most exciting and consistent tech channel available. Thanks for all the videos provided so far. This one is outstanding since I am happy user of great Linux since 2k. Thank you! Have a nice day!
The greatest improvement to PC performance I have ever experienced wasn't new HW. Deepin 15 BETA loaded to a ram disk that kept up with a Ryzen build with a GEN3 NVMe drive. IDK how but MX LINUX 21 can be loaded to boot to ram.
I completely agree on this video and I can even mention that even the CPU usage seems to be much lower in Linux than Windows 10. I notice on the battery life and fan usage. When I run windows I hear frequently the fan running and battery life last less than when I use Linux. I even tested this in a completely new install in Windows and same result.
There has to be a reason that individual apps request a lot more memory on Windows than Linux. That's the interesting question here. I seriously doubt you've properly isolated RAM usage.
interesting video as always Gary. can you please explain Android Entropy Threshold next time? i googled it yesterday but never have any conclusive explanation. so would you be kind enough to explain it next time?
Calculating memory usage is tricky. Most status reporting only count the user memory, but often doesn't count the kernel memory like page table increase and system resources. On the user side, shared memory be complicate because multiple application could share the same resources. I like using "zero"-ed memory as it reflects the memory used and if RAM was reduced below this line would result in perf loss.
Untill recently, I was using thinkpad with 4GB RAM. It's ridiculous, that it come with windows preinstalled, since just the fresh install was enough to get swapping. Out of couriosity, I've tested how it runs, and we're talking like 10+ seconds to open the menu bar.
I thought he was joking in the end when he was saying that's the proof that Linux is more efficient. Who cares about how much memory is used, what we need are benchmarks with a small amount of ram and real applications.
Why would benchmarks with low RAM be useful? Both systems will start to swap and at that point benchmarks ate useless. The point is that Windows will arrive in this low RAM situation sooner than Linux.
@@GaryExplains Maybe the behavior of the programms would change, if there is no ram left. Isn't it even more efficient to use the avaiable ram and not let it sit around? I don't really think Windows would perform better but pure ram metrics are no proof for worse efficiency or performance. Furthermore, there are no "serious" Windows systems with less than 8GB Ram nowadays.
In general programs don't change their behavior when there is no more RAM, they just report an error and close. Also your "serious" Windows system comment is not helpful. I can go to any major retailer and buy Windows laptops with only 4GB. How you define "serious" is completely subjective. And even if we agree on a definition does that mean that average consumers aren't important?
Yes videos on memory are interesting, I remember being a developer in the early 90’s, and being particularly concerned about the impact of ‘page thrashing’ on the logistics system we were developing, but not truly understanding the concept and so feeling limited in my design decisions… long time ago, fun times 😁
Keep in mind that in Windows since XP, it only frees memory when it needs to, so if you open a ton of programs then close them, it won't clear everything, but if you open something else up that needs a lot of memory, it will clear out old memory as needed. Linux is starting to do more of this too, particularly in favor of filesystem cache, which will be cleared aggressively if something else needs that space.
I am now waiting for a detailed video covering MacOS 12 and Windows 11. Their differences in handling multitasking and multiple displays and the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Would be nice to explain what exactly you compared. Memory used by a program is not a single simple number. In Windows Task Manager you can see columns like Working set, Active private working set, Private working set, Shared working set, Commit size, Paged pool, NP pool. Which one of them did you use? How are you sure it's the right parameter to compare with Linux? In Linux top will also give several numbers: VIRT, RES, and SHR. If you compare different things you get different results, but that's not informative at all for a comparison.
Right. You can safely ignore most of this video by the fact that we already know Windows and Ubuntu perform similarly in actual usage metrics. So it's likely these numbers don't mean what he thinks they mean.
I second this. First thing that got me was the 4GB+ memory usage on reboot on W11. I run W11 too and booted up with a few programs and stuff running in the background (antivirus, anydesk etc nothing huge) and the actual physical memory in use is roughly 3.3GB. The system commit which is at about 6GB corresponds with my page file also being 6GB. So maybe he used that number. Speaking under correction :D
Another thing to note is that he hasn't tried testing Windows and Linux with different amounts of total RAM. This does matter, as Windows does somewhat modify its behaviour - how conservative to be with RAM - based on the total RAM. If it sees 4GB total RAM, then it behaves more conservatively than if it sees 32GB of total RAM. It's not a vast difference, mind you, but there is a "less RAM = be more conservative, more RAM = stretch out a bit more and prioritise performance instead, as there's room to expand into" slightly modified behaviour in there, which further brings these results into question when you've not tested multiple RAM configurations (on both systems) to see if this does modify OS behaviour. If it sees more RAM, then it'll use more. Cache up more stuff. Prefetching stuff. So if you run Windows on a more RAM-limited system, then it uses less and behaves more conservatively about what to keep around in RAM. (This is why some people are saying "when I boot Windows, it's not taking about 4GB of RAM, as we see in these results". Yeah, because Windows has seen the total RAM and is being more conservative with its usage. Try it on a machine with, say, 32GB of RAM and it'll be less "precious" about those bytes and instead prioritises better performance, by trying to load and prefetch more of the OS into RAM - because you can afford it and this'll make it perform better.)
well, besides caching, the services and how many services that are startted up will have an impact. A typical Windows install, in my opinion, will tend to have far more services than a typical Linux install. And the question becomes - how essential (really) are a lot of those Windows services?
if they were used by thirdy party applications, then they would be essential, but if that was the case, then opening new applications would have less aditional ram usage on windows than on linux, that simply isnt the case, quite the opposite, so those services arent that usefull. the main issue is that microsoft dont have any competition, no matter how much windows is bad, it wont lose marketshare, no matter how much microsoft invest into improving it , they wont gain aditional marketshare since they already dominate it.
I used to use Black Viper's list of unnecessary services to disable them but it's definitely not as bad as it used to be. I also have a 5800X with 32GB RAM so I don't spend a lot of time on this. Also, that's with Windows, Rockstor, and BunsenLabs running on Proxmox.
I've been test driving ubuntu mate on a 2 GB Ram netbook, with a classical HD and an intel pentium for work this week; it works like a charm (general office stuff, browsing, video...) I have more powerful machines but it feels so damn great! Now I have an amazing battle computer.
Gary, This is a very challenging topic to do a complete comparison. The assumption that using more memory is bad is something I'm not completely sold on. Swapping pages to disk is bad in that it slows things down but if a system optimizes performance within it's the total system memory available, that seems preferable? What about a comparison of running tasks on Win vs Linux with insufficient memory and counting the page faults/page swaps? If you can show that Linux pages less given the same physical memory, then I would find the comparison more compelling. I'm a fan of linux myself, started in the 1980's with HP-UX, so I'm not being critical of either OS, just thinking about what other factors effect these systems memory management schemes.
Using more memory can't improve performance (outside of caching, which generally happens at an OS level, not per process level). Using more memory will cause more swapping, which as you correctly said is bad for performance.
@@GaryExplains I've been fooled before by lazy de-allocation schemes. Optimum overall performance doesn't always prefer cleaning up immediately, there is no penalty for using more memory until you run out. Perhaps you accounted for that. I would not be surprised to find your results are indeed the full story but I am always looking for the technical loopholes.
So Gary, when did you come and visit Ottawa Canada? You were quite clearly doing your video from the National Art Gallery, with the Parliament buildings in the background. 😉
Interesting the difference between running the same programs on windows vs Linux - Given that a string is a string and an int is an int regardless of OS, I would have thought that they'd be much closer. I would have thought that the difference would have mostly beeen due to different window decorators, which would have been minimal. Is it the underlying graphics libraries which account for the large difference? Obviously, the OS is the part where I knew there was a vast difference - I've created a custom Linux OS based around ICEWM for a Raspberry PI which boots to desktop in around 100MB.
In fairness he did use POP which if I recall correctly uses Cosmic (I think) which is based off Gnome which is the heaviest of all Linux desktops and it still came on top compared to Windows, not only that tool kits are shared which is why Firefox looks exactly the same on the 2 platforms and so on. So even with the disadvantage of having a Gnome based desktop :D
I think it might be due in part to how Linux share memory between processes and how applications are build against libraries, in Linux you tend to build against the system libraries (so the same library for all the applications), in Windows you tend to distribute the libraries you need (so several versions of the same library to serve several applications). Linux also only loads into memory the parts of an executable that are needed (in tech lingo, it maps the file into memory), and under memory pressure it does not send it to swap, just discards the data in RAM and if needed loads it again from disk. Probably Windows does something similar, but I don't know up to what extend. One thing that caught my attention is when I have used Blender, Linux seems a 20% faster, in a task that is basically GPU load... there should be more magic happening in the memory subsystem.
one thing to mention is popOS is far from the lightest distro,you could take it ridiculously low with something like ubuntu MATE or especially those fancy window managers (though those systems are so minimal,it may get a bit unfair). this proves evermore that linux is definitive for older computers.
I'm not sure if this is just about less ram = better. Maybe superfetch uses more ram but makes the user experience better (for example)? I'm no expert and I am not sure how either Win11 or PopOS uses and manages memory but maybe win11 is intentionally using more memory for good not evil? I know that an integrated GPU uses memory for graphics but I don't know how this is allocated or managed by the two OS (is that strictly set in BIOS or does the OS dynamically change ram allocated to the iGPU as required? I would find a video that looks at these things and explains the difference between how operating systems manage memory really interesting, follow up video maybe?
I think you forgot to mention something when talking about booting an OS. Unused memory is WASTED MEMORY. You don't benefit from not using the available memory when the OS can use it for something, this is not the same as hard drive storage. Also the memory is dynamically allocated, Windows will use it when nothing else is using it, the minute something else needs it Windows will reduce it's own footprint as best as it can.
@@GaryExplains I think it needs to be clear that its not very beneficial ie wasteful for an OS booting up to not be able to use all the RAM that it has available.
Linux also works on the same philosophy, so it isn't that Windows does this and Linux doesn't. Plus the rest of the tests also show that Windows uses more RAM, and there I am measure the process memory usage, which doesn't include file caching etc.
@@GaryExplains I get that and don't dispute this one bit, but it's considered obvious that Windows is bloated and uses 'too much RAM', based on how I see people talk in both online and physical communities. And while it's generally true context i think is still important, I guess I've been worn out from trying to explain this to too many people regarding unused RAM, so many videos mention how much RAM is used when Windows is idle which is actually fine.
But as I said, the rest of the tests also show that Windows uses more RAM, and there I am measure the process memory usage, which doesn't include file caching etc.
Great video Gary and pleased to see you used my distro of choice Pop. This is certainly a much fairer comparison than say using Puppy Linux. I would be interested in your thoughts on why say Firefox in Windows uses more RAM than Linux. To me this was the most confusing part, unless Firefox can offload more of it's work onto existing Linux processes and hence doesn't need to spawn new ones? Thanks for getting my brain thinking on a Tuesday...
I'd like to see a dynamic, real-time visual representation of the memory pages, colour coded by PID to see the randomness of the distribution. Is this even a thing?
Something I think you totally missed is that, program memory usage doesn't just boil down to the OS itself, but also the C memory allocator it uses, which differs on both systems. On Windows it uses CRT, and on Linux it uses gblic/libc. But still, Linux most likely has the superior memory management either way.
He also had some interesting picks of programs to test. Firefox is a well known, (infamous at this point), memory whore on Windows. Only Goggle Chrome is worse for filling up memory needlessly I believe.
It also completely miss specifying what was the amount of Ram on each system. The more RAM the system has, the more the OS/program might want to use, to improve general performance. Un-intuitively, not in use RAM is wasted RAM. When there are many programs running and close to maximum memory usage overall, this is where the memory management really takes place. The analyze here falls fairly short. I am not siding with Windows or Linux or MacOS, I am just pointing that analyzing memory usage is a lot more complex.
1) Yes, you can use a swap partition on a Linux but it's deprecated due to - the cost of partition border crossing. - not having any benefits. - partitions wasting some disk space. - pretty sure something else I forgot. 2) The RAM amount directly affects how much is used for caching, especially on Linux. Linux is much less hesitant using RAM for caching, which is especially notable on a firewall distro cuz they'll use it all for performance (but will give you what you ask for).
@rautamiekka Do you have a link to show that swap partition are deprecated? Also, you know that Linux isn't hesitant or eager to swap, it depends on the value you set for swappiness.
That won't impact memory usage. Even if you have programs sharing a dynamically linked library, that only saves disk space. Each program has its own memory space so if you have five programs that use a gtk window there will be five sets of memory allocations.
I've set up a Thinkpad T460 with Linux, and got it to run Monster Hunter World. I would not recommend playing Monster Hunter World on a Thinkpad T460, but if your really want to or have to, you can. Tip: Using the lowest resolution has the best performance. Take a mental note of where the resolution settings are, as you won't be able to read them when you go to change them again.
By using a window manager on the linux machine you can further reduce the ram used. My system, no joke, idles at around 250MB of ram used. And this is not using some cut down distro. This is using POP OS with i3WM
@@GaryExplains I'm not saying this had to be included in the video, the video covers everything needed. Putting this info in probably would confuse a lot of people. Just pointing out that with Linux you get the freedom to choose!
I just wonder how the memory is actually being utilized. For example, I open a movie file in Windows that's 4GB, and the same in Linux, Windows may opt because of 16GB available to store it all in memory, where Linux might be conservative and stream from the disk more often. I would like to see the relation between the memory and how often is the disk being accessed, both HD and SSD. What are also the benchmarks about the speed of startup of large programs between the two. For example Loading a 1GB image file, closing the app and re-opening the file. Is one stored in memory for faster access between the two?
Years ago I found an interesting bug in Windows NT 4.0 Server. I was porting a rather large Unix application to NT. The computer I had was a real beast. I don't remember how many megabytes of RAM it had, but it was a lot for the day (maybe 512 MB? For comparison I think my home PC had about 16 MB of RAM at the time.). But the hard drive was a little more limited, so I didn't allocate much space for the page file (swap space in Unix lingo), maybe just 2 MB. But apparently when I started up the programs that made up the application, Windows would start trying to swap out existing stuff to the pagefile to make room for more stuff in RAM even though it didn't need to since it had loads of RAM. As soon as the small page file was full, performance would hit a wall and it would start showing errors about being out of memory even though there was no way it had used up 512 MB (or whatever it was). But if I wasted a full 512 MB of disk space for a pagefile that would never get used much, everything ran just fine.
I miss the information on how long did e.g. the monk render take on Windows vs Linux. Right now, it seems a bit pointless to just compare the RAM usage. Did they take approximately the same time, or did one of them finish faster?
It isn't "a bit pointless to just compare the RAM usage" when the video is called "Windows vs Linux RAM Usage". This video isn't about performance. It also isn't about cream cakes which is why I don't mention them either.
Of course I knew that Windows would be worse than Linux at memory management but I'm surprised at how much worse it is. I would be curious to see what architectural differences cause it to be so bad.
One important piece you missed was that Windows uses page files to do memory defragmentation. Even if you have enough physical memory free to load a memory intensive program, sometimes you will get out of memory errors because Windows can't defragment the memory properly without a page file. This is an issue I came across, I had 32GB of physical memory, only about 4GB was in active use (fresh reboot) and opened a program that allocated about 8GB-12GB of memory, so total usage would have been around 16 of 32GB available. But the program would crash with out of memory errors because it couldn't allocate a full contiguous block of memory and Windows won't defragment memory without a page file!
That makes no sense. I think you have misunderstood something. All physical memory is fragmented, that is the whole point. The contiguous memory block would have been in virtual memory not physical and adding a swap file won't "defrag" the memory. Memory fragmentation in the virtual memory is indeed a thing, but it doesn't work as you describe.
@@GaryExplains maybe the underlying cause is different, but the symptoms are as follows: 1. Turn page file off 2. Run program 3. Get out of memory error (memory usage doesn't even approach using all physical memory!) 4. Turn page file on 5. Run program 6. No error (memory usage still same, not even close to using full physical memory) If not using page file to do memory defragmentation to allocate a contiguous block of memory, I don't see another explanation for getting out of memory errors under these circumstances. There is plenty of memory available, so the only thing I can see that would prevent allocation of new memory is that the memory it tried to allocate is used by another program or outside of the addressable space (impossible given the program is 64-bit). This issue affected two games for me too, Cyberpunk 2077 and Halo MCC (specifically Halo 2 and Halo 3). Again, 32GB of physical memory and fresh reboot with only about 4-5GB of memory used at time of launching those games.
The only thing swap is used for is to free physical memory. So looking into this a bit deeper there are system calls on Windows and on Linux that ask the OS for contiguous, nonpaged physical memory. For example, on Windows, MmAllocateContiguousMemory() allocates a block of nonpaged memory that is contiguous in physical address space. Using calls like this would force the OS to swap out any pages that get in the way of a contiguous block. Later they can be swapped back in at a different address. In that sense, it is the memory defragmentation you are describing. Microsoft note that "When physical memory is fragmented on a computer that has a large amount of RAM, calls to MmAllocateContiguousMemory, which require the operating system to search for contiguous blocks of memory, can severely degrade performance." Calls like this are normally reserved for drivers. It would be interesting to understand why it happens with the games you describe. It could be the GPU driver I guess.
@@GaryExplains this describes basically what I had in mind, maybe I used the incorrect terminology. I guess I could use something like RAMMap and VMMap to see if these titles allocate contiguous blocks (particularly if memory is constrained) - might give some insight into if this is really the cause or if it's something more obtuse.
Open source for personal use will be only for slow HW. Because the fan club goes crazy if I just mention we get one distro for Advanced HW. Remember the anger over W11 for newer HW. No one with the new HW had a right to get a new O/S made for faster HW.
I've used a modern Linux version on a 128MB RAM VPS for a large part of the last decade. To be fair, part of the OS ram usage was probably not counted because it was run using OpenVZ containerization, but it was running several sites through apache and other services I used daily. Eventually, I upgraded to a 512MB VPS when I started running slightly heavier applications. None of that is even imaginable using windows, so I wouldn't say there's much of a competition between the two...
@@GaryExplains You're assuming I was trying to do a comparison, but I was only providing a data point. The thing is, that data point blows Windows out of the water all by itself. That's because you wouldn't even expect a Windows machine to run stable if it had 128MB available straight after boot. And because you wouldn't be taken seriously if you said that a heavy application like Apache runs using only 128MB of RAM on Windows. And because Windows itself uses far more more RAM than that, even if we allow Windows to not count 50% of the RAM it uses, using that as a very generous estimation of how much it needs to run its GUI. (Also, note that the comparison by itself wouldn't be unfair - it depends on what you're comparing. If I'm comparing running an OS using the minimum amount of RAM, I don't have to handicap one OS because the other OS forces you to use desktop even on servers.)
Interesting video as lack of RAM is often the killer of an old PC. I got a old thing with Windows 10 and Mint Xfce and it was interesting for me to compare. Actually it was not that different, every time I start two or three modern apps (UA-cam on Opera amongst other things) I run out of RAM and swap begins. Windows need some fine tuning (disabling Windows Defender, Update and stuff) before it runs OK but after that, it's not that bad and respond actually quite well. On heavy usage, once Linux swapping blocked me completely and Windows did not, but I don't (yet) make generalities out of it RAM usage it interesting, but swap management and the way applications repond to it is even more interesting, in my mind
Thanks. I kept getting the terms "pig" and "hog" mixed up. I know one refers to software that uses a lot of memory, while the other refers to software that uses a lot of storage, but I could never remember which is which, and I'm not sure younger programmers still use that slang.
not quite sure why I clicked on this since I knew the result from the get go, but I am glad I did. I learned the hard way that windows is a memory hog, that is by making a server out of an old prebuilt. Surprise to no one ran out of memory eventually and as a quick fix switched to linux. I did end up adding more ram to the machine but I like having the overhead that comes from linux as well, since I will definitely keep expanding the software that runs on the machine.
I was using OS/2 for about 10 years, before switching to Linux. I have never run Windows as my main OS on my own computers. BTW, I used to do 3rd level OS/2 support at IBM Canada, but was already using it for 5 years before I started that job.
Well I have a very different experience with Linux than you guys, because it was the worst OS experience I had, crashed an awful lot with recent hardware and unstable as hell.
@@victorhugofranciscon7899 whenever there is new hardware released you need to wait a little longer on Linux to get the necessary driver support but this delay is improving.
yeah, that is an important thing because there are different ways to measure ram. another important thing is how much ram the computer uses when other programs need it.
I've notice that if the same app is created across all platforms that the app size always seem to be the smallest for MacOS with Linux close behind. Windows usually seems to always be the largest. As for app execution space I have no clue.
I don't know how MacOS works, but for linux I believe it has something to do with shared library. You install application X and it needs Z as dependency. Other time you install application Y that also needs Z, package manager will skip installing Z again because it's already there.
So I don't know if you took into account windows superfetch... It keeps programs and stuff loaded that it thinks you will use next so it's faster to startup... You can turn this off and there will be a huge ram decrease.
The only thing I find annoying when using Linux if there is a memory leak in an app, the OS doesn't know how to handle it when the ram is full, it just freezes instead of killing off the app that uses most of ram (happened a few times without noticing for certain flatpak apps).
@@GaryExplains maybe it's my distro then? Not sure why it happens to me. Cause I turned off the swap partition and disabled swap overall (just using the ram), but yeah, doesn't kill off the app, just freezes. I once left it for 5h to see if the system recovers, but instead it just got very very hot and I had to hard reboot.
@@GaryExplains well my system has 32GB of RAM and usually I don't get out of memory and don't need the swap partition (which by default has swappiness set to 60 and is being used even without needing the ram). I either set the swappiness to very low number or disable it. Again, it was a situation in which I got memory leakage while developing and debugging, I didn't have many apps open and didn't expect it to crash like it did. I believe it's the setting of the OOM. Just read that by default it would try to keep the app running, instead of killing off the one that uses critical amount of memory. I guess I need to reconfigure that part for future issues.
I understand, but you don't gain anything from disabling the swap space. You can tweak the swappiness parameter, but think of it this way, with a higher swappiness number then pages that haven't been used for a long time will go to swap and free up real physical RAM for your system, you actually gain from this. Here is an interesting article haydenjames.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-space/
Very nice and informative video! I have a secondary PC with a quad core s775 Xeon and 8Gb of Ram. I only use it 4-5 times a month for internet browsing,watching video and in the odd case for some emergency Zoom call from work. It's been a couple of months that I am considering installing Linux (instead of Win10) on that machine to give it some more breathing room. My main concer is driver support and general compatibility of the hardware as it is quite old. After watching your video I am a step closer to making that decision.
Thanks Gary that was interesting. I think a very interesting comparison also would’ve been comparing them to MacOS because MacOS is Unix based but a very modified version that I expect to be much heavier than any Linux distribution out there. It also has an X86_64 version for intel processors and an arm version for the new M processors from apple. That video would be especially interesting because with the M processors the memory is on chip and shared between the CPU and GPU cores, and not upgradable. Also very expensive to get a higher processor configuration to benefit from the larger memory (especially if you want 32 GB like me).
I compared the RAM-usage between Windows and Linux a bit over 2 years ago when I still dual-booted. I observed the same, Linux really does use less RAM for the same tasks. I also compared it for gaming, on Linux with wine, in Windows itself and Linux native. Linux with wine and Windows native have roughly the same memory-usage which is what I would expect. For Linux native both the RAM-usage and graphics card memory usage were much lower for the same game if running Linux native compared to Windows or Linux with wine. That shocked me the most, I would expect the memory-usage for games to be roughly the same but it is not. I would love a deep dive in which it gets explained. I wonder if the guy from David's Garage could do that.
It's amazing how much RAM LibreOffice is using, compared with MS Office. One opened document in LibreOffice uses 142 MB while one document opened in MS Office uses only 46 MB. That's on a Windows 10 PRO computer, with 16 GB of RAM and a Ryzen 5 2600. Sure, LibreOffice is free, but also it behaves and looks like something from 2010.
Hi Gary , good content but I think you over simplified the analysis , just because a program uses less memory RAM in one OS , it doesn`t mean that OS is more efficient. Example , I can make a program that uploads everything into Ram or tweak an OS Memory Manager to keep as much information possible in RAM with the purpose to be faster.
I`m not saying the conclusion will be different ( I think Linux is better ! ) but , we need to analyze more metrics in how the Ram is used to conclude about efficiency ! Keep the good work :)
Way back in the dark ages, it was common to do all sorts of tricks to minimize memory. However, those tricks that saved memory often had poorer performance. Back then do did what you had to, just to get something to run in the very limited hardware of the day.
I have to wonder if the arm64 architecture is sharing video memory with the main system memory. It just seems like too big of a difference to be solely based on the CPU architecture.
I kind of expected these results, but not by such a margin. Interesting. Proud to have switched to Ubuntu linux, even though I am still counted as a Windows user, as the laptop came with Windows.
Fascinating video. It would be really interesting to know where all the extra memory is going in Windows compared to Linux. There must be a legitimate reason and not just poor programming on Microsoft’s part. Could it be all the legacy code that Windows has to support? It never ceases to amaze me that we measure PC RAM in GBs now. My ZX81 was a functioning (just) computer with 1K of RAM!
If it is indeed due to legacy features then I think really it is time to abandon those features and have them emulated if people want to use them. I mean if Apple kept all of their legacy features somehow then they would probably be in the same scenario as Windows. Sometimes the past really can get in the way of progress and I don't think Microsoft, or even processors that use the X86 instruction set have adressed this.
@@johntrevy1 Far easier said than done when your tech is so embedded in the corporate world. Apple has a different customer base to Windows and can “get away” with deprecating old functionality easier. Imagine the outcry if Windows stopped running some government or large corporation’s legacy application. Believe me, there are thousands of large organisations that still run their business and rely on legacy applications from decades past. I could give you one real example that would shock you but to do so would be highly unprofessional of me. So yes, in summary I agree with you.
@@paddycoleman1472 I get what you are saying, but why should the civilian world be held back by the corporate world? As I say, things can be emulated these days if people absolutely NEED to run legacy software. I mean I know they sort of already have with discontinuing 16 bit native app support in 64 bit opertating systems, but people can emulate that with a VM.
@@johntrevy1 We had this in Windows at one point. Private individuals had Win 3.x/9x and the professional world had NT. Microsoft could split Windows again and make the Home version mean just that but is it worth it? So what if Windows needs an extra 3 or 4GB over Linux? Hardware is cheap (enough) that you can just throw another stick of RAM in your PC. At the end of the day, the amount of RAM required is only important (cannot believe I am writing this as an old school programmer who was taught every byte is precious) when it impacts functionality. I would much rather Microsoft spend their development effort on making Windows robust, secure with a cohesive UI/UX than reducing RAM requirements. Windows in its current guise is “good enough” and for those folks where it is not, then you have several choices of Linux, UNIX, Chrome OS, Apple etc.
It is a shame that the Linux world does not gather around one desktop distribution and give Windows a run for its money. Windows no longer looks anything like Windows so a new UI/UX with Linux would not be an inhibitor to adoption. People want to be able to walk (metaphorically speaking) in to their computer store and buy a computer, printer, software and other accessories and have it just work. Windows does this in people’s minds whereas Linux has an image of “hobbyist” about it. For example, will HP provide me with a driver for my shiny new printer? Linux continues to be a lost opportunity on the desktop which is a shame.
The question is does Linux have similar or better performance while rendering when compared to Windows. Do a test for that. I would very much like to know.
Which version of Windows were you running? I'm assuming 10. Because if you were running 3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2K, XP I'd be surprised if it was more than PopOS.
@@GaryExplains Ahh I had forgotten it when I had watched thru the video and didn't see it anywhere when I commented. Very interesting video nevertheless, thanks for making it! Keep up the great work! My friend 20 years ago kept say linux is less demanding for doing the same tasks. I always believed him, but since I was a gamer, linux wasn't really an option for me. But these days linux might actually be viable. Tho music production with vsts etc might not be good enough. Like all vsts aren't available on linux or mac... or other way round sometimes.
It would be interesting to do a deep dive to understand why there is the difference overall (on bootup say) as well as individual program differences. Windows is a much larger OS (in terms of code base), there may be more processes running - many of which may not be doing very much that are useful most of the time, but philosophically Windows is designed to support many legacy edge cases - that comes with baggage. I know the video mentioned the issue of account for free memory from available memory, tricky to quantify. If you have much more code running, then those .dlls are memory mapped so are "using" memory virtual memory pages, however they are available to be used by any program that needs those pages. Also Windows desktop OS is very geared up for all the legacy frameworks to support the legacy applications, particularly for desktop/video. It's a bit difficult to compare the two when Linux doesn't have the same legacy heritage (baggage!)
Thumbs up on this vid and anothe r thumbs up on a videonon the MMU and virtual memory management, etc. Also, having worked on the IBM AS/400 or iSeries or Series i, I was always impressed with their hardware addressing via verticle and horizontal microcode with the OS never addressing or seeing the physical. A very unique computer architecture.
To be fair since I popped a 64gb kit in I see windows 10 idle at 9gb. On the 16gb machines I see around 5gb. On a VM however 2gb and that's with 20gb available to the VM.
But how do you know that extra RAM used by Windows is actually wasted? It could be Superfetch or Windows preemptively loading commonly used files into RAM to speed up opening them. A better comparison would be how Linux and Windows compare in terms of speed with memory full and the same programs open. Time how long it takes to open a program, and time how long it takes to complete a CPU intensive task. Microsoft might figure that the time it takes to empty that extra ram is negligible.
@@GaryExplains I don't know it for a fact, but the OS could be caching document files or application components that were used the previous time into RAM so that they open faster. Or pre-allocating more memory to the program that the OS expects to grow in size.
No, it doesn't do that. Besides for Blender I measured the RAM usage for starting the app. RAM usage for opening a file, and RAM usage for rendering. The last of those has nothing to do with file caching. In general, all caching on Windows and Linux is at the system level, not the process level. I measured the process RAM usage.
This is pretty interesting, especially when you configure a new system. On windows just get twice the RAM and you should be fine. Since memory is dirt cheap nowadays, this isn't really as big an issue as it was earlier (at least for a normal user, power users may feel different) but you should know what you need for each system.
It would be interesting to see if there is any noticeable performance difference when running on the same hardware with different amounts of memory being used.
Linux has long had better memory management compared to not just Windows, but a number of other OSs. I know Linus and the Kernel crew were somewhat obsessive about memory management and making sure things used memory efficiently.
At one point, I was working for a company in Montreal, and they had been running a Web based JAVA application on (at the time) Sun's Solaris, and were constantly have problems with stability, which we traced to memory. Back then, Sun Workstation memory was very expensive, so I said, let's try putting Linux on the same workstation, and see how the app runs since I knew that Linux was better with memory management. I prepared a Sun workstation that we had laying around as a spare with Linux, and all the appropriate software...and sure enough, it was totally stable, and our QA people tested it and they found it stable, and faster as well through their entire test suite. What I didn't tell them is that the workstation I had used had only half the memory the big server the software was going to run on!
BTW, that's a nice view of the Parliamentry LIbarary in Ottawa in the background!
I was amused when toying with Illumos recently (a fork of OpenSolaris) in a VM with 4 GB RAM, just running "sudo pkg update" on a fresh install caused the package manager to run out of memory. Though it turns out it was partly my fault - Solaris wanted to use part of the hard disk as swap, but my VM was already running out of disk space. Still, you'd think 4 GB of memory would be enough memory to run the package manager. I note that it's written in Python, which I'm normally a big fan of, but obviously the pkg code needs a bit more work. Though admittedly this is all kind of an edge case, since if you really need to run the GUI version of Solaris in a production environment you'd want to run it on bare metal.
I somewhat disagree. Imo Windows handles drive caching way better if one has much memory.
what a joke better memory management? this topic keep exists. Ram comsumption always equal to feature that os give. what a joke compare ram usage after reboot. Windows include good looking animation, anti-virus (bitdefender). if u look in ram usage of application. it totally no different. it just different in reboot. Ram already cheap. so spend 2GB ram for OS. its not a big problem at now for so much feature that OS can give.
Linux only good for specific job. like run web server, vpn server only and so on. for big multi tasking. no reason can beat windows.
@@davidstephen7070 ok
I have prepared Linux systems that run in 32MB of RAM (yes MB, not GB), with GUI and no swap. It wasn't meant for general usage (prepared using Yocto for medical devices), but gives an idea of what you can achieve. I felt like an artisan sculpting a gem.
[EDIT] Clarification to address some random replies: The device was a medical device able to operate without interruptions for years if necessary, the last test I know it was operating for 6 months w/o interruption, but years was the target, and had to support OTA and operate with no swap. The UI was touch driven and responsive, IEC 62366-2 certified. I'm sure that there are other options in the market, but I doubt many tick so many boxes. And yes, a version of Windows for Devices, Windows Embedded or WIndows IOT (or whatever name it has today) was part of the platform set evaluated by the customer.
My main computer runs a fully functional Linux desktop full of all the apps I use, and it only uses around 160Mb of RAM at boot
You sure you really mean Mb and not MB? That's just 4MB
Ya.... and to point out, you built it for a singular model of hw, for a very very very selective set of things.
Linux is awesome for that, but don't get it twisted..... that isn't compatible with you normal desktip user.
@@atemoc 160 mb? Awesome. What distro do you use?
@@casperes0912 they probably meant MiB
This is yet another reason to love Linux, as it can make older hardware even those limited to to 4GB RAM usable, were as WIndows on the same hardware is a no go.
OLDER hw limited to 4 GIGABYTES?!?! Said by a Commodore64 fan?!?
Something is not right here
@@georgebetrian676 bruh
don't even need 4gbs or ram. if you download a minimum installation of arch linux for example and download a minimalistic window-manager or desktop-environment you can easily get away with 2gbs of ram.
I have an old Dell XPS 430 from 2009 lying around, on Windows 10 it seemed like it was dying. I install GNU/Linux in June & it's revived, now it runs Debian.
@@UltimusShadow. Debian is not bad, it just does not update fast enough for me, which is why I run Solus Linux which so far has been the most stable rolling release I've ran, and the only major issues I've had so far that were not my own fault, is I can't get the system fan in my 13in Mid-2012 Macbook pro to spin as fast as it should as MBPFan is not in the repos so it runs a little warm to the touch, but does not thermal throttle.
And that's with PopOs Gnome, which is kind of known as a ram hog in itself. I bet with KDE or Xfce the results would be even lower. But of course if we're only talking about raw ram usage numbers.
I don't understand why people still use popos. It's in the same league as hannah montanna os. It's a meme. Just use MX or Mint!
@@runed0s86 both mx and mint looks like its from 2004..pop is modern and works perfectly on my nvidia rtx3070
@@runed0s86 Because Pop!_OS what almost no other Linux based OS is. It's made by a company that installs it on their own computers to sell! That brings a quality of focus on the desktop Linux rarely seen among pet hobby distros. And it's improving rapidly every year.
If you have the ram for gnome, why not? Vanilla gnome is the best thing I’ve experienced in desktop environments. I prefer it over macos and kde. It definitely takes some time getting used to, but it is very much worth it. And yes, I am a (vanilla) gnome fanboy
A fresh KDE Plasma on x86_64 is at around *400-500 MB.* Not a desktop designed specifically to be lightweight, either.
Does zram / dump on linux have significant impact, and how does that compare to pagesys on windows.
Can you please do a video on that?
Im currently using zram on a laptop with 2444mhz ram
It doesnt really impact performance maybe 1-2% list but adds alot of virtual ram without killing my ssd
16 -> 24 with 1-2 ratio compression
2-1*
interestingly Windows is really optimized on swapping to compensate that memory usage and prevents lockup or stall while Linux memory usage is low but when on high pressure memory usage and started to swap it tends to locks up (if you dont have the prelockd, nohang, le9 patch, etc..)
Well in windows, the memory management is in kernel level.
While in Linux its in the software itself. For security its saver, but performance...
@@syarifairlangga4608 dude you know nothing about what you speek of
@@christianlockley2578 Rather than saying "Dude you know nothing", say "I disagree, this is why you are wrong..." and you go ahead and explain the right way of the architectural operations to prove him wrong.
Honestly more distros need to start shipping a functional OOM killer...
@@DarkGT The problem is that what they said is just wrong. I agree that maybe saying "you don't know nothing" is harsh and quite frankly rude, but that still doesn't change the fact that the info is wrong, it's like if someone told you water boils at 50C, it just doesn't --there is nothing to explain.
would love that memory (virtual) allocation video! :D
i don't know much about virtual memory so i second that
its about 3 or 4 commands on linux, really easy, look up Arch Wiki.
It isn't about commands, it is about how virtual memory works at the kernel level.
@@GaryExplains yeah ive been wondering how that worked for a long time, would be nice to make a video on that.
@@vyrsh0 for what? isn't it enabled by default in the kernel?
A fun exercise. It should be said using more memory is not necessarily a bad thing. Memory if used to enhance speed it's a good thing, if a program is carrying unused baggage and making memory unavailable to others it's a bad thing.
I've seen others say Windows uses 4GB of RAM after boot but I've never seen it myself. I'm currently using 3.4GB out of 16GB, with two Firefox/UA-cam tabs open and 20hrs. uptime. It is worth noting I've seen both Windows and Linux use more RAM when more is available. With 4GB total Windows 10 will use 1.6GB after boot, compared to 2.4GB with 16GB total.
Yeah, it's weird. When I had just installed Windows 11 on my new PC it was using only 2-3 gigs of memory, but after installing all the apps and all the updates it started sitting at 5-6 gigs. Windows must be caching a crap ton of stuff. Honestly it doesn't matter much, unused RAM is useless RAM. And if that memory usage is for caching then I'm sure Windows can clear it when it actually needs to be used.
It will only use more than 4 GB of RAM on startup if it can. I am typing this right now, yes right now, on an HP Stream 7 with 1GB of Ram running Windows 10. Using more RAM On startup if available is a very good thing, it means the system is optimizing and prefetching programs you use so they run faster than better.
The way Windows reports used ram is interesting to say the least, as depending on if I enable or disable the onboard GPU on my CPU and which PCIe GPU (AMD or Nvidia both with 8GBS of Video ram) I fit I can get the same computer and Windows 10 build to report between 2GB's and 11GBs of used ram without running any application.
This seems to be a result of how shared memory buffers for the GPUs both built in and PCIe are reported. As such the reported used or free ram may or may not reflect how much actual systems ram is being used and how efficient windows ram management is, and ,may be more down to how the GPU drivers are setup for the system you are looking at ;-)
High Windows RAM usage at bootup is most likely from Windows SuperFetch - the OS is filling up available RAM with whatever programs you would have last used, so they will open quicker.
Thanks Gary. Nice vid, the only thing one might be asking is WHY does windows use more than linux for the same program? Are there decisions made like "lets load the whole lot into ram so things load quicker when the user wants them..."
Can we do Linux vs FreeBSD? Is there even a difference in memory usage?
I noticed the difference with a 2016 laptop a little over 2 years ago. I couldn't even get windows 8.1 to load up Blender. It worked perfectly fine when using Linux mint. True I wasn't gong to be doing heavy tasks with it. As it was a entry level laptop. But been able to load it in the first place said it all.
I’m curious about how this compares to MacOS
I have 16gb of memory on my laptop running Arch Linux. It still amazes me that I can use nearly all of it just by opening up PyCharm and Firefox.
It would be interesting to see some speed benches. How does memory used effects speed.
Agree!
8 channel ram is four times faster than dual channel ram. Quad channel ram is twice as fast as dual channel ram. Dual channel ram is faster than even a new NVMe storage drive and has way less latency. You guys are on a race to the bottom.
@@maxhughes5687 That's not what I meant. If an app is using more memory in one OS, is it as fast as the one running on OS using less memory?
@@woodcat7180 YES I would say the one using more memory is as fast as the one using more memory.
@@maxhughes5687 😁, edit: LESS!
Actually, yeah, it'd be cool to make a video on how memory is actually organised and how the structural difference impacts the performance, especially before the systems starts swapping (which is obviously going to happen sooner with the Windows system, even cheating on the swappiness on the Linux system to force it swap earlier). Basically, if you had an infinite amount of RAM on either system, is one system more performant than the other?
From my humble point of view Gary's YT is the one of the most exciting and consistent tech channel available. Thanks for all the videos provided so far. This one is outstanding since I am happy user of great Linux since 2k. Thank you! Have a nice day!
The greatest improvement to PC performance I have ever experienced wasn't new HW. Deepin 15 BETA loaded to a ram disk that kept up with a Ryzen build with a GEN3 NVMe drive. IDK how but MX LINUX 21 can be loaded to boot to ram.
I completely agree on this video and I can even mention that even the CPU usage seems to be much lower in Linux than Windows 10. I notice on the battery life and fan usage. When I run windows I hear frequently the fan running and battery life last less than when I use Linux. I even tested this in a completely new install in Windows and same result.
I think system calls in windows are more complex than in Linux
It also depends on which distro youre using for linux. I use a few distros that use 64mb min and a few that use less than 300mb
Well since I was trying to compare like-with-like, I didn't use a niche distro.
There has to be a reason that individual apps request a lot more memory on Windows than Linux. That's the interesting question here. I seriously doubt you've properly isolated RAM usage.
Can't stop enjoying your content tbh
interesting video as always Gary. can you please explain Android Entropy Threshold next time?
i googled it yesterday but never have any conclusive explanation. so would you be kind enough to explain it next time?
Calculating memory usage is tricky. Most status reporting only count the user memory, but often doesn't count the kernel memory like page table increase and system resources. On the user side, shared memory be complicate because multiple application could share the same resources. I like using "zero"-ed memory as it reflects the memory used and if RAM was reduced below this line would result in perf loss.
I know it is tricky, I even say so in the video!
Yes, I want that video on virtual memory. Thanks for this one!
Untill recently, I was using thinkpad with 4GB RAM. It's ridiculous, that it come with windows preinstalled, since just the fresh install was enough to get swapping. Out of couriosity, I've tested how it runs, and we're talking like 10+ seconds to open the menu bar.
I thought he was joking in the end when he was saying that's the proof that Linux is more efficient. Who cares about how much memory is used, what we need are benchmarks with a small amount of ram and real applications.
Why would benchmarks with low RAM be useful? Both systems will start to swap and at that point benchmarks ate useless. The point is that Windows will arrive in this low RAM situation sooner than Linux.
@@GaryExplains Maybe the behavior of the programms would change, if there is no ram left. Isn't it even more efficient to use the avaiable ram and not let it sit around? I don't really think Windows would perform better but pure ram metrics are no proof for worse efficiency or performance. Furthermore, there are no "serious" Windows systems with less than 8GB Ram nowadays.
In general programs don't change their behavior when there is no more RAM, they just report an error and close. Also your "serious" Windows system comment is not helpful. I can go to any major retailer and buy Windows laptops with only 4GB. How you define "serious" is completely subjective. And even if we agree on a definition does that mean that average consumers aren't important?
@@GaryExplains You are right, seems like I am in my high end bubble.
@@perschistence2651 Your not alone. If you pay through the nose for that high end hardware, you'll want to use it.
Yes videos on memory are interesting, I remember being a developer in the early 90’s, and being particularly concerned about the impact of ‘page thrashing’ on the logistics system we were developing, but not truly understanding the concept and so feeling limited in my design decisions… long time ago, fun times 😁
Keep in mind that in Windows since XP, it only frees memory when it needs to, so if you open a ton of programs then close them, it won't clear everything, but if you open something else up that needs a lot of memory, it will clear out old memory as needed. Linux is starting to do more of this too, particularly in favor of filesystem cache, which will be cleared aggressively if something else needs that space.
No, it isn't quite as you describe.
I am now waiting for a detailed video covering MacOS 12 and Windows 11. Their differences in handling multitasking and multiple displays and the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Would be nice to explain what exactly you compared. Memory used by a program is not a single simple number. In Windows Task Manager you can see columns like Working set, Active private working set, Private working set, Shared working set, Commit size, Paged pool, NP pool. Which one of them did you use? How are you sure it's the right parameter to compare with Linux? In Linux top will also give several numbers: VIRT, RES, and SHR. If you compare different things you get different results, but that's not informative at all for a comparison.
Right. You can safely ignore most of this video by the fact that we already know Windows and Ubuntu perform similarly in actual usage metrics. So it's likely these numbers don't mean what he thinks they mean.
I second this. First thing that got me was the 4GB+ memory usage on reboot on W11. I run W11 too and booted up with a few programs and stuff running in the background (antivirus, anydesk etc nothing huge) and the actual physical memory in use is roughly 3.3GB. The system commit which is at about 6GB corresponds with my page file also being 6GB. So maybe he used that number. Speaking under correction :D
Another thing to note is that he hasn't tried testing Windows and Linux with different amounts of total RAM.
This does matter, as Windows does somewhat modify its behaviour - how conservative to be with RAM - based on the total RAM. If it sees 4GB total RAM, then it behaves more conservatively than if it sees 32GB of total RAM.
It's not a vast difference, mind you, but there is a "less RAM = be more conservative, more RAM = stretch out a bit more and prioritise performance instead, as there's room to expand into" slightly modified behaviour in there, which further brings these results into question when you've not tested multiple RAM configurations (on both systems) to see if this does modify OS behaviour.
If it sees more RAM, then it'll use more. Cache up more stuff. Prefetching stuff.
So if you run Windows on a more RAM-limited system, then it uses less and behaves more conservatively about what to keep around in RAM.
(This is why some people are saying "when I boot Windows, it's not taking about 4GB of RAM, as we see in these results". Yeah, because Windows has seen the total RAM and is being more conservative with its usage. Try it on a machine with, say, 32GB of RAM and it'll be less "precious" about those bytes and instead prioritises better performance, by trying to load and prefetch more of the OS into RAM - because you can afford it and this'll make it perform better.)
@@klaxoncow true. Windows aggressively pushes things out of RAM to keep it exactly at no more than 80% usage if possible, for example.
@@klaxoncow I agree with all you have said here. In a lot of cases unused RAM is wasted RAM (can't remember who said that lol). Cheers mate!
well, besides caching, the services and how many services that are startted up will have an impact. A typical Windows install, in my opinion, will tend to have far more services than a typical Linux install. And the question becomes - how essential (really) are a lot of those Windows services?
The answer is not essential at all, just a lot of microsoft bloatware
if they were used by thirdy party applications, then they would be essential, but if that was the case, then opening new applications would have less aditional ram usage on windows than on linux, that simply isnt the case, quite the opposite, so those services arent that usefull.
the main issue is that microsoft dont have any competition, no matter how much windows is bad, it wont lose marketshare, no matter how much microsoft invest into improving it , they wont gain aditional marketshare since they already dominate it.
I used to use Black Viper's list of unnecessary services to disable them but it's definitely not as bad as it used to be. I also have a 5800X with 32GB RAM so I don't spend a lot of time on this. Also, that's with Windows, Rockstor, and BunsenLabs running on Proxmox.
I've been test driving ubuntu mate on a 2 GB Ram netbook, with a classical HD and an intel pentium for work this week; it works like a charm (general office stuff, browsing, video...) I have more powerful machines but it feels so damn great! Now I have an amazing battle computer.
Gary,
This is a very challenging topic to do a complete comparison. The assumption that using more memory is bad is something I'm not completely sold on. Swapping pages to disk is bad in that it slows things down but if a system optimizes performance within it's the total system memory available, that seems preferable? What about a comparison of running tasks on Win vs Linux with insufficient memory and counting the page faults/page swaps? If you can show that Linux pages less given the same physical memory, then I would find the comparison more compelling. I'm a fan of linux myself, started in the 1980's with HP-UX, so I'm not being critical of either OS, just thinking about what other factors effect these systems memory management schemes.
Using more memory can't improve performance (outside of caching, which generally happens at an OS level, not per process level). Using more memory will cause more swapping, which as you correctly said is bad for performance.
@@GaryExplains I've been fooled before by lazy de-allocation schemes. Optimum overall performance doesn't always prefer cleaning up immediately, there is no penalty for using more memory until you run out. Perhaps you accounted for that. I would not be surprised to find your results are indeed the full story but I am always looking for the technical loopholes.
So Gary, when did you come and visit Ottawa Canada? You were quite clearly doing your video from the National Art Gallery, with the Parliament buildings in the background. 😉
😂
Interesting the difference between running the same programs on windows vs Linux - Given that a string is a string and an int is an int regardless of OS, I would have thought that they'd be much closer. I would have thought that the difference would have mostly beeen due to different window decorators, which would have been minimal. Is it the underlying graphics libraries which account for the large difference? Obviously, the OS is the part where I knew there was a vast difference - I've created a custom Linux OS based around ICEWM for a Raspberry PI which boots to desktop in around 100MB.
No, there is difference in some C/C++ Integer types between OSs.
For example: the "long" int type is 64 bit in linux, and 32 bit in windows.
In fairness he did use POP which if I recall correctly uses Cosmic (I think) which is based off Gnome which is the heaviest of all Linux desktops and it still came on top compared to Windows, not only that tool kits are shared which is why Firefox looks exactly the same on the 2 platforms and so on. So even with the disadvantage of having a Gnome based desktop :D
@@presentarmsonlinux
Problems with Gnome?
I think it might be due in part to how Linux share memory between processes and how applications are build against libraries, in Linux you tend to build against the system libraries (so the same library for all the applications), in Windows you tend to distribute the libraries you need (so several versions of the same library to serve several applications). Linux also only loads into memory the parts of an executable that are needed (in tech lingo, it maps the file into memory), and under memory pressure it does not send it to swap, just discards the data in RAM and if needed loads it again from disk. Probably Windows does something similar, but I don't know up to what extend.
One thing that caught my attention is when I have used Blender, Linux seems a 20% faster, in a task that is basically GPU load... there should be more magic happening in the memory subsystem.
@@xrafter It depends of the 64-bit memory model used by the distribution.
one thing to mention is popOS is far from the lightest distro,you could take it ridiculously low with something like ubuntu MATE or especially those fancy window managers (though those systems are so minimal,it may get a bit unfair).
this proves evermore that linux is definitive for older computers.
I'm not sure if this is just about less ram = better. Maybe superfetch uses more ram but makes the user experience better (for example)? I'm no expert and I am not sure how either Win11 or PopOS uses and manages memory but maybe win11 is intentionally using more memory for good not evil? I know that an integrated GPU uses memory for graphics but I don't know how this is allocated or managed by the two OS (is that strictly set in BIOS or does the OS dynamically change ram allocated to the iGPU as required? I would find a video that looks at these things and explains the difference between how operating systems manage memory really interesting, follow up video maybe?
Yup. Typing this right now on a 1gb RAM tablet that runs Windows 10. And that includes having youtube open on a web browser on that tablet.
Curious about pagefile vs swap usage in windows and Linux
I think you forgot to mention something when talking about booting an OS. Unused memory is WASTED MEMORY. You don't benefit from not using the available memory when the OS can use it for something, this is not the same as hard drive storage. Also the memory is dynamically allocated, Windows will use it when nothing else is using it, the minute something else needs it Windows will reduce it's own footprint as best as it can.
No I didn't forget that at all. I even included a small segment in the video about the difference between free memory and available memory.
@@GaryExplains I think it needs to be clear that its not very beneficial ie wasteful for an OS booting up to not be able to use all the RAM that it has available.
Linux also works on the same philosophy, so it isn't that Windows does this and Linux doesn't. Plus the rest of the tests also show that Windows uses more RAM, and there I am measure the process memory usage, which doesn't include file caching etc.
@@GaryExplains I get that and don't dispute this one bit, but it's considered obvious that Windows is bloated and uses 'too much RAM', based on how I see people talk in both online and physical communities. And while it's generally true context i think is still important, I guess I've been worn out from trying to explain this to too many people regarding unused RAM, so many videos mention how much RAM is used when Windows is idle which is actually fine.
But as I said, the rest of the tests also show that Windows uses more RAM, and there I am measure the process memory usage, which doesn't include file caching etc.
You could make another video showing the processor load in each system.
Great video Gary and pleased to see you used my distro of choice Pop. This is certainly a much fairer comparison than say using Puppy Linux. I would be interested in your thoughts on why say Firefox in Windows uses more RAM than Linux. To me this was the most confusing part, unless Firefox can offload more of it's work onto existing Linux processes and hence doesn't need to spawn new ones? Thanks for getting my brain thinking on a Tuesday...
This was a very informative video. Thanks Gary.
I'd like to see a dynamic, real-time visual representation of the memory pages, colour coded by PID to see the randomness of the distribution. Is this even a thing?
Something I think you totally missed is that, program memory usage doesn't just boil down to the OS itself, but also the C memory allocator it uses, which differs on both systems. On Windows it uses CRT, and on Linux it uses gblic/libc.
But still, Linux most likely has the superior memory management either way.
He also had some interesting picks of programs to test. Firefox is a well known, (infamous at this point), memory whore on Windows. Only Goggle Chrome is worse for filling up memory needlessly I believe.
It also completely miss specifying what was the amount of Ram on each system. The more RAM the system has, the more the OS/program might want to use, to improve general performance. Un-intuitively, not in use RAM is wasted RAM. When there are many programs running and close to maximum memory usage overall, this is where the memory management really takes place. The analyze here falls fairly short. I am not siding with Windows or Linux or MacOS, I am just pointing that analyzing memory usage is a lot more complex.
@@jeanjasinczuk7543 it's also a meaningless endeavor, since the vast majority of computer users never come close to running out of free RAM
1) Yes, you can use a swap partition on a Linux but it's deprecated due to
- the cost of partition border crossing.
- not having any benefits.
- partitions wasting some disk space.
- pretty sure something else I forgot.
2) The RAM amount directly affects how much is used for caching, especially on Linux. Linux is much less hesitant using RAM for caching, which is especially notable on a firewall distro cuz they'll use it all for performance (but will give you what you ask for).
I'm pretty sure swap partitions are still the main, with swap files being used less.
@rautamiekka Do you have a link to show that swap partition are deprecated? Also, you know that Linux isn't hesitant or eager to swap, it depends on the value you set for swappiness.
In the spirit of unused RAM is wasted RAM, Windows will incorporate ads in the file explorer. Brought to you by Carls Jr.
Wonder how much of that difference is due to shared libraries like gtk, which windows would more likely have statically linked.
That won't impact memory usage. Even if you have programs sharing a dynamically linked library, that only saves disk space. Each program has its own memory space so if you have five programs that use a gtk window there will be five sets of memory allocations.
I don't think you are right Tyler. Shared read-only memory is a thing.
Im glad i found your channel very thorough and persice
I've set up a Thinkpad T460 with Linux, and got it to run Monster Hunter World.
I would not recommend playing Monster Hunter World on a Thinkpad T460, but if your really want to or have to, you can.
Tip: Using the lowest resolution has the best performance. Take a mental note of where the resolution settings are, as you won't be able to read them when you go to change them again.
By using a window manager on the linux machine you can further reduce the ram used. My system, no joke, idles at around 250MB of ram used. And this is not using some cut down distro. This is using POP OS with i3WM
Obviously there are lightweight Linux distros, but that wasn't the point of the video.
@@GaryExplains I'm not saying this had to be included in the video, the video covers everything needed. Putting this info in probably would confuse a lot of people. Just pointing out that with Linux you get the freedom to choose!
I just wonder how the memory is actually being utilized. For example, I open a movie file in Windows that's 4GB, and the same in Linux, Windows may opt because of 16GB available to store it all in memory, where Linux might be conservative and stream from the disk more often. I would like to see the relation between the memory and how often is the disk being accessed, both HD and SSD. What are also the benchmarks about the speed of startup of large programs between the two. For example Loading a 1GB image file, closing the app and re-opening the file. Is one stored in memory for faster access between the two?
Years ago I found an interesting bug in Windows NT 4.0 Server. I was porting a rather large Unix application to NT. The computer I had was a real beast. I don't remember how many megabytes of RAM it had, but it was a lot for the day (maybe 512 MB? For comparison I think my home PC had about 16 MB of RAM at the time.). But the hard drive was a little more limited, so I didn't allocate much space for the page file (swap space in Unix lingo), maybe just 2 MB. But apparently when I started up the programs that made up the application, Windows would start trying to swap out existing stuff to the pagefile to make room for more stuff in RAM even though it didn't need to since it had loads of RAM. As soon as the small page file was full, performance would hit a wall and it would start showing errors about being out of memory even though there was no way it had used up 512 MB (or whatever it was). But if I wasted a full 512 MB of disk space for a pagefile that would never get used much, everything ran just fine.
I miss the information on how long did e.g. the monk render take on Windows vs Linux. Right now, it seems a bit pointless to just compare the RAM usage. Did they take approximately the same time, or did one of them finish faster?
It isn't "a bit pointless to just compare the RAM usage" when the video is called "Windows vs Linux RAM Usage". This video isn't about performance. It also isn't about cream cakes which is why I don't mention them either.
Of course I knew that Windows would be worse than Linux at memory management but I'm surprised at how much worse it is. I would be curious to see what architectural differences cause it to be so bad.
One important piece you missed was that Windows uses page files to do memory defragmentation. Even if you have enough physical memory free to load a memory intensive program, sometimes you will get out of memory errors because Windows can't defragment the memory properly without a page file. This is an issue I came across, I had 32GB of physical memory, only about 4GB was in active use (fresh reboot) and opened a program that allocated about 8GB-12GB of memory, so total usage would have been around 16 of 32GB available. But the program would crash with out of memory errors because it couldn't allocate a full contiguous block of memory and Windows won't defragment memory without a page file!
That makes no sense. I think you have misunderstood something. All physical memory is fragmented, that is the whole point. The contiguous memory block would have been in virtual memory not physical and adding a swap file won't "defrag" the memory. Memory fragmentation in the virtual memory is indeed a thing, but it doesn't work as you describe.
@@GaryExplains maybe the underlying cause is different, but the symptoms are as follows:
1. Turn page file off
2. Run program
3. Get out of memory error (memory usage doesn't even approach using all physical memory!)
4. Turn page file on
5. Run program
6. No error (memory usage still same, not even close to using full physical memory)
If not using page file to do memory defragmentation to allocate a contiguous block of memory, I don't see another explanation for getting out of memory errors under these circumstances. There is plenty of memory available, so the only thing I can see that would prevent allocation of new memory is that the memory it tried to allocate is used by another program or outside of the addressable space (impossible given the program is 64-bit).
This issue affected two games for me too, Cyberpunk 2077 and Halo MCC (specifically Halo 2 and Halo 3). Again, 32GB of physical memory and fresh reboot with only about 4-5GB of memory used at time of launching those games.
The only thing swap is used for is to free physical memory. So looking into this a bit deeper there are system calls on Windows and on Linux that ask the OS for contiguous, nonpaged physical memory. For example, on Windows, MmAllocateContiguousMemory() allocates a block of nonpaged memory that is contiguous in physical address space. Using calls like this would force the OS to swap out any pages that get in the way of a contiguous block. Later they can be swapped back in at a different address. In that sense, it is the memory defragmentation you are describing. Microsoft note that "When physical memory is fragmented on a computer that has a large amount of RAM, calls to MmAllocateContiguousMemory, which require the operating system to search for contiguous blocks of memory, can severely degrade performance." Calls like this are normally reserved for drivers. It would be interesting to understand why it happens with the games you describe. It could be the GPU driver I guess.
@@GaryExplains this describes basically what I had in mind, maybe I used the incorrect terminology.
I guess I could use something like RAMMap and VMMap to see if these titles allocate contiguous blocks (particularly if memory is constrained) - might give some insight into if this is really the cause or if it's something more obtuse.
I would make some smart Linux FTW comment but I'm slightly distracted by the Canadian National Gallery background. I like it!!!
Pls compare windows and mac memory management 🙏
Linux wins 💥💥💥
not linux user.... but watching proprietary getting blown away by open source gives u a different kinda feels 😁
Open source for personal use will be only for slow HW. Because the fan club goes crazy if I just mention we get one distro for Advanced HW. Remember the anger over W11 for newer HW. No one with the new HW had a right to get a new O/S made for faster HW.
It is useful to see some numbers put to the usual claims. Great work Gary.
I've used a modern Linux version on a 128MB RAM VPS for a large part of the last decade. To be fair, part of the OS ram usage was probably not counted because it was run using OpenVZ containerization, but it was running several sites through apache and other services I used daily. Eventually, I upgraded to a 512MB VPS when I started running slightly heavier applications. None of that is even imaginable using windows, so I wouldn't say there's much of a competition between the two...
Except you weren't running a desktop, not a fair comparison.
@@GaryExplains You're assuming I was trying to do a comparison, but I was only providing a data point. The thing is, that data point blows Windows out of the water all by itself. That's because you wouldn't even expect a Windows machine to run stable if it had 128MB available straight after boot. And because you wouldn't be taken seriously if you said that a heavy application like Apache runs using only 128MB of RAM on Windows. And because Windows itself uses far more more RAM than that, even if we allow Windows to not count 50% of the RAM it uses, using that as a very generous estimation of how much it needs to run its GUI.
(Also, note that the comparison by itself wouldn't be unfair - it depends on what you're comparing. If I'm comparing running an OS using the minimum amount of RAM, I don't have to handicap one OS because the other OS forces you to use desktop even on servers.)
Indeed I was assuming that you were trying to do a comparison, since that is the context of the video. My bad, I guess.
Windows 11: "Hold my beer"
PC: "please no"
Interesting video as lack of RAM is often the killer of an old PC. I got a old thing with Windows 10 and Mint Xfce and it was interesting for me to compare. Actually it was not that different, every time I start two or three modern apps (UA-cam on Opera amongst other things) I run out of RAM and swap begins. Windows need some fine tuning (disabling Windows Defender, Update and stuff) before it runs OK but after that, it's not that bad and respond actually quite well. On heavy usage, once Linux swapping blocked me completely and Windows did not, but I don't (yet) make generalities out of it
RAM usage it interesting, but swap management and the way applications repond to it is even more interesting, in my mind
Thanks.
I kept getting the terms "pig" and "hog" mixed up. I know one refers to software that uses a lot of memory, while the other refers to software that uses a lot of storage, but I could never remember which is which, and I'm not sure younger programmers still use that slang.
not quite sure why I clicked on this since I knew the result from the get go, but I am glad I did.
I learned the hard way that windows is a memory hog, that is by making a server out of an old prebuilt. Surprise to no one ran out of memory eventually and as a quick fix switched to linux. I did end up adding more ram to the machine but I like having the overhead that comes from linux as well, since I will definitely keep expanding the software that runs on the machine.
Thanks Gary, very informative!!
A video for how virtual memory management is done would be MOST welcome.
It is here ua-cam.com/video/4e18yybPo1E/v-deo.html 👍
Been using Linux for 2 years before that I used Windows for over 15 years and have never regretted it. Linux is the way to go!
I was using OS/2 for about 10 years, before switching to Linux. I have never run Windows as my main OS on my own computers.
BTW, I used to do 3rd level OS/2 support at IBM Canada, but was already using it for 5 years before I started that job.
Well I have a very different experience with Linux than you guys, because it was the worst OS experience I had, crashed an awful lot with recent hardware and unstable as hell.
@@victorhugofranciscon7899 whenever there is new hardware released you need to wait a little longer on Linux to get the necessary driver support but this delay is improving.
Which app do you use to measure ram in Linux and which in windows
yeah, that is an important thing because there are different ways to measure ram.
another important thing is how much ram the computer uses when other programs need it.
@@vyrsh0 my polybar says one neofetch other top other and htop other... Polybar is the right one
I've notice that if the same app is created across all platforms that the app size always seem to be the smallest for MacOS with Linux close behind. Windows usually seems to always be the largest. As for app execution space I have no clue.
I don't know how MacOS works, but for linux I believe it has something to do with shared library. You install application X and it needs Z as dependency. Other time you install application Y that also needs Z, package manager will skip installing Z again because it's already there.
Wonder how a debloated Windows version would perform?
So I don't know if you took into account windows superfetch... It keeps programs and stuff loaded that it thinks you will use next so it's faster to startup... You can turn this off and there will be a huge ram decrease.
Superfetch doesn't alter the RAM used on a per process basis like during the render test.
I'm glad I switched to POP OS nearly two years ago.
The only thing I find annoying when using Linux if there is a memory leak in an app, the OS doesn't know how to handle it when the ram is full, it just freezes instead of killing off the app that uses most of ram (happened a few times without noticing for certain flatpak apps).
That doesn't sound right. The kernel uses a Out Of Memory Killer: www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/html/understand/understand016.html
@@GaryExplains maybe it's my distro then? Not sure why it happens to me. Cause I turned off the swap partition and disabled swap overall (just using the ram), but yeah, doesn't kill off the app, just freezes. I once left it for 5h to see if the system recovers, but instead it just got very very hot and I had to hard reboot.
Why turn off the swap? What advantage do you gain?
@@GaryExplains well my system has 32GB of RAM and usually I don't get out of memory and don't need the swap partition (which by default has swappiness set to 60 and is being used even without needing the ram). I either set the swappiness to very low number or disable it. Again, it was a situation in which I got memory leakage while developing and debugging, I didn't have many apps open and didn't expect it to crash like it did. I believe it's the setting of the OOM. Just read that by default it would try to keep the app running, instead of killing off the one that uses critical amount of memory. I guess I need to reconfigure that part for future issues.
I understand, but you don't gain anything from disabling the swap space. You can tweak the swappiness parameter, but think of it this way, with a higher swappiness number then pages that haven't been used for a long time will go to swap and free up real physical RAM for your system, you actually gain from this. Here is an interesting article haydenjames.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-space/
Very nice and informative video!
I have a secondary PC with a quad core s775 Xeon and 8Gb of Ram. I only use it 4-5 times a month for internet browsing,watching video and in the odd case for some emergency Zoom call from work.
It's been a couple of months that I am considering installing Linux (instead of Win10) on that machine to give it some more breathing room. My main concer is driver support and general compatibility of the hardware as it is quite old.
After watching your video I am a step closer to making that decision.
Thanks Gary that was interesting.
I think a very interesting comparison also would’ve been comparing them to MacOS because MacOS is Unix based but a very modified version that I expect to be much heavier than any Linux distribution out there. It also has an X86_64 version for intel processors and an arm version for the new M processors from apple. That video would be especially interesting because with the M processors the memory is on chip and shared between the CPU and GPU cores, and not upgradable. Also very expensive to get a higher processor configuration to benefit from the larger memory (especially if you want 32 GB like me).
MacOS is unix not unix based it is certified unix dumby.
Thank you, this was very illuminating!
I compared the RAM-usage between Windows and Linux a bit over 2 years ago when I still dual-booted. I observed the same, Linux really does use less RAM for the same tasks. I also compared it for gaming, on Linux with wine, in Windows itself and Linux native. Linux with wine and Windows native have roughly the same memory-usage which is what I would expect. For Linux native both the RAM-usage and graphics card memory usage were much lower for the same game if running Linux native compared to Windows or Linux with wine. That shocked me the most, I would expect the memory-usage for games to be roughly the same but it is not. I would love a deep dive in which it gets explained. I wonder if the guy from David's Garage could do that.
You want vram used as much as possible. The same as wanting your GPU usage at 100%. It IS MEANT TO BE USED AND OPTIMIZED.
It's amazing how much RAM LibreOffice is using, compared with MS Office. One opened document in LibreOffice uses 142 MB while one document opened in MS Office uses only 46 MB. That's on a Windows 10 PRO computer, with 16 GB of RAM and a Ryzen 5 2600. Sure, LibreOffice is free, but also it behaves and looks like something from 2010.
UA-cam recomends me so many random videos so why has it never shown your channel i will (now) sub to.
Hi Gary , good content but I think you over simplified the analysis , just because a program uses less memory RAM in one OS , it doesn`t mean that OS is more efficient. Example , I can make a program that uploads everything into Ram or tweak an OS Memory Manager to keep as much information possible in RAM with the purpose to be faster.
Yes, but I am using real world programs that do real world things, not some test program.
I`m not saying the conclusion will be different ( I think Linux is better ! ) but , we need to analyze more metrics in how the Ram is used to conclude about efficiency ! Keep the good work :)
Way back in the dark ages, it was common to do all sorts of tricks to minimize memory. However, those tricks that saved memory often had poorer performance. Back then do did what you had to, just to get something to run in the very limited hardware of the day.
I'm currently running my Ubuntu with Brave browser and 16 tabs opened. 3.2 Gig used, about 170 MB in swap.
on my linux setup, I've got just a window manager called dwm and it just uses 52 mb of memory at start
Doesn't surprise me at all. I've used LINUX for over 10 years to revive older machines that would run circles around the windows counterparts.
I have to wonder if the arm64 architecture is sharing video memory with the main system memory. It just seems like too big of a difference to be solely based on the CPU architecture.
Where did you see a big difference between x86-64 and ARM64. I thought I showed that they were basically the same in terms of overall memory usage.
Would like to see a video on virtual memory.
I kind of expected these results, but not by such a margin. Interesting. Proud to have switched to Ubuntu linux, even though I am still counted as a Windows user, as the laptop came with Windows.
Great Video.
Can you also do a memory comparison for a server setup ?
file server / web server / ...
Where one does not need a GUI.
Fascinating video. It would be really interesting to know where all the extra memory is going in Windows compared to Linux. There must be a legitimate reason and not just poor programming on Microsoft’s part. Could it be all the legacy code that Windows has to support? It never ceases to amaze me that we measure PC RAM in GBs now. My ZX81 was a functioning (just) computer with 1K of RAM!
If it is indeed due to legacy features then I think really it is time to abandon those features and have them emulated if people want to use them. I mean if Apple kept all of their legacy features somehow then they would probably be in the same scenario as Windows. Sometimes the past really can get in the way of progress and I don't think Microsoft, or even processors that use the X86 instruction set have adressed this.
@@johntrevy1 Far easier said than done when your tech is so embedded in the corporate world. Apple has a different customer base to Windows and can “get away” with deprecating old functionality easier. Imagine the outcry if Windows stopped running some government or large corporation’s legacy application. Believe me, there are thousands of large organisations that still run their business and rely on legacy applications from decades past. I could give you one real example that would shock you but to do so would be highly unprofessional of me. So yes, in summary I agree with you.
@@paddycoleman1472 I get what you are saying, but why should the civilian world be held back by the corporate world? As I say, things can be emulated these days if people absolutely NEED to run legacy software. I mean I know they sort of already have with discontinuing 16 bit native app support in 64 bit opertating systems, but people can emulate that with a VM.
@@johntrevy1 We had this in Windows at one point. Private individuals had Win 3.x/9x and the professional world had NT. Microsoft could split Windows again and make the Home version mean just that but is it worth it? So what if Windows needs an extra 3 or 4GB over Linux? Hardware is cheap (enough) that you can just throw another stick of RAM in your PC. At the end of the day, the amount of RAM required is only important (cannot believe I am writing this as an old school programmer who was taught every byte is precious) when it impacts functionality. I would much rather Microsoft spend their development effort on making Windows robust, secure with a cohesive UI/UX than reducing RAM requirements. Windows in its current guise is “good enough” and for those folks where it is not, then you have several choices of Linux, UNIX, Chrome OS, Apple etc.
It is a shame that the Linux world does not gather around one desktop distribution and give Windows a run for its money. Windows no longer looks anything like Windows so a new UI/UX with Linux would not be an inhibitor to adoption. People want to be able to walk (metaphorically speaking) in to their computer store and buy a computer, printer, software and other accessories and have it just work. Windows does this in people’s minds whereas Linux has an image of “hobbyist” about it. For example, will HP provide me with a driver for my shiny new printer? Linux continues to be a lost opportunity on the desktop which is a shame.
How much time did the tests take? It is ok to Windows use more memory if the time to compile was faster the Linux.
That is awesome video
The question is does Linux have similar or better performance while rendering when compared to Windows. Do a test for that. I would very much like to know.
The answer is yes. This guy compared it also using Pop OS:
ua-cam.com/video/cpE2B2QSsa0/v-deo.html
@@jaimesoad He used Ubuntu but yes that was a huge increase.
@@kousikadhikary sorry, my bad.
Interested in virtual memory video. Thanks.
There was quite a lot of interest, so I published it quite quickly. Here it is: ua-cam.com/video/4e18yybPo1E/v-deo.html
Which version of Windows were you running? I'm assuming 10. Because if you were running 3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2K, XP I'd be surprised if it was more than PopOS.
Windows 11, as I stated in the video.
@@GaryExplains Ahh I had forgotten it when I had watched thru the video and didn't see it anywhere when I commented.
Very interesting video nevertheless, thanks for making it! Keep up the great work!
My friend 20 years ago kept say linux is less demanding for doing the same tasks. I always believed him, but since I was a gamer, linux wasn't really an option for me.
But these days linux might actually be viable. Tho music production with vsts etc might not be good enough. Like all vsts aren't available on linux or mac... or other way round sometimes.
It would be interesting to do a deep dive to understand why there is the difference overall (on bootup say) as well as individual program differences. Windows is a much larger OS (in terms of code base), there may be more processes running - many of which may not be doing very much that are useful most of the time, but philosophically Windows is designed to support many legacy edge cases - that comes with baggage. I know the video mentioned the issue of account for free memory from available memory, tricky to quantify. If you have much more code running, then those .dlls are memory mapped so are "using" memory virtual memory pages, however they are available to be used by any program that needs those pages. Also Windows desktop OS is very geared up for all the legacy frameworks to support the legacy applications, particularly for desktop/video. It's a bit difficult to compare the two when Linux doesn't have the same legacy heritage (baggage!)
"Linux is more efficient, water is wet" is my new phrase now, thanks Gary, this is HILARIOUS
"RAM is faster, speed is king" is my new phrase now, this is elementary.
Thumbs up on this vid and anothe r thumbs up on a videonon the MMU and virtual memory management, etc.
Also, having worked on the IBM AS/400 or iSeries or Series i, I was always impressed with their hardware addressing via verticle and horizontal microcode with the OS never addressing or seeing the physical. A very unique computer architecture.
To be fair since I popped a 64gb kit in I see windows 10 idle at 9gb. On the 16gb machines I see around 5gb. On a VM however 2gb and that's with 20gb available to the VM.
But how do you know that extra RAM used by Windows is actually wasted? It could be Superfetch or Windows preemptively loading commonly used files into RAM to speed up opening them.
A better comparison would be how Linux and Windows compare in terms of speed with memory full and the same programs open. Time how long it takes to open a program, and time how long it takes to complete a CPU intensive task. Microsoft might figure that the time it takes to empty that extra ram is negligible.
Ok, so ignoring the free RAM at boot up, how do you explain the rest of the results?
@@GaryExplains I don't know it for a fact, but the OS could be caching document files or application components that were used the previous time into RAM so that they open faster. Or pre-allocating more memory to the program that the OS expects to grow in size.
No, it doesn't do that. Besides for Blender I measured the RAM usage for starting the app. RAM usage for opening a file, and RAM usage for rendering. The last of those has nothing to do with file caching. In general, all caching on Windows and Linux is at the system level, not the process level. I measured the process RAM usage.
This is pretty interesting, especially when you configure a new system. On windows just get twice the RAM and you should be fine. Since memory is dirt cheap nowadays, this isn't really as big an issue as it was earlier (at least for a normal user, power users may feel different) but you should know what you need for each system.
It would be interesting to see if there is any noticeable performance difference when running on the same hardware with different amounts of memory being used.