Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests

David M Williams
Monday, 21 July 2008 21:18

Opinion and Analysis

Windows’ memory usage went up by 0.07GB, or 71.68MB. The CPU still fluctuated madly but hung around 20%. Under Fedora, memory usage increased by only 50MB and with a maximum processor utilisation of 4%, shortly resuming to 1% while sitting idle (with Windows still jumping all about.) Closing each application did release the memory and this was reliably repeated over several tests. However, opening Microsoft Word multiple times – including with a large 53 page document – did consume substantially more memory than the equivalent actions and document with OpenOffice Writer. Additionally, Fedora’s processor usage remained in low numbers, and barely rose above 1% when idle.

We barely got warmed up but it’s time to say farewell until Thursday. However, what you’ve seen today are some real numbers and experiences between Windows Vista and a modern Linux distro based on the sorts of things a home user would be doing. Apart from watching a YouTube video Linux consistently required less memory. More than this, it increased RAM requirements only minimally after an application had been loaded already and remained active. Additionally, Linux only ever began swapping memory out to disk when it absolutely had to, always giving preference to physical RAM. At no time, under any experiment, did Linux crash or fail to boot.

You might know people who use Microsoft Windows because it’s what they are familiar with and because it came with their computer and they hadn’t realised or thought about alternatives. Yet, here is further evidence as to the advanced state of Linux distributions such that it delivers a superb and stable platform for whatever application you wish to run – and that’s the point of an operating system.

Update: part two of this article is now available here.