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The Linux distillery Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests
The Linux distillery Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests | Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Tuesday, 22 July 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 4 Virtual memory is a means of allowing your computer to act as if it has more RAM than it really does. This magic happens because segments of RAM are swapped out to a reserved portion of the disk and back again when required. This will happen when you load up the memory with more than it can physically hold. By using virtual memory – or swap space – the computer can act as if it has more memory than it really does and thus run more programs at the same time, or hold larger data structures.Featured Whitepaper
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Given both computers have 4GB physical RAM and neither has indicated the memory in use exceeds this amount there is no clear reason why Windows is already choosing to swap any information to disk at this time. Instead, Linux is behaving as you would intuitively expect; it is holding everything running in the actual RAM and has not been required to use the hard drive for pseudo memory. It’s difficult to find any references online as to just why Windows swaps items out to disk so early on in the piece, particularly because it is an expensive operation when it comes to system performance. Tom’s Hardware performed an interesting experiment where they set the amount of virtual memory available to Windows to be nothing and then tested how the system performed with gradually decreasing amounts of genuine RAM. They found that they could not run on 2GB or less of RAM without applications crashing, including the Aero interface itself, rendering the machine useless until rebooting. With merely 512MB of RAM Windows became absolutely useless and crashed all by itself even when sitting idle. I reproduced their test on my Fedora-powered Dell laptop. First I removed a 2GB RAM chip leaving 2GB remaining. It still ran as usual any without any disk swapping activity until after I had loaded several applications and large files. I next removed that 2GB chip and inserted a single 512MB chip. Again, Fedora booted and ran fine. It continued to sit idle with about 1.06GB used and now reported swap memory in use right away. I then disabled the swap partition so there was no virtual memory available. The computer still booted fine but would not start the GNOME graphical environment. I could log in to a command shell and execute commands. Linux behaved with stability the entire time. When it comes to maximising your available RAM, as well as overall stability, there was no contest. Linux clearly has it all over Windows here. So now let’s perform some genuine tasks. CONTINUED |
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