this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
174 points (92.6% liked)
Technology
61227 readers
4144 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
RAM is RAM. If you're able to manage it better, that's nice, but programs will still use whatever RAM they were designed to use. If you need to store 5 GiB of something in memory, what happens with the other 2.5 GiB, if they claim that it's 2x as "efficient?"
Definitely true, but I will say Mac has pretty decent compression on RAM. I’m assuming that’s why they feel this way. My old MBP 2013 had 8, and I used it constantly until earlier this year when I finally upgraded. It was doing pretty well all things considered, mostly because of on the fly RAM compression.
Lower end macs tend to have slower SSDs so this could be a double whammy on these machines.
I’m specifically talking about the in memory compression, not swap.
But memory compression works the same way swap works. When memory is needed LRU page is ~~written on disk~~ compressed, and where application needs to read data from compressed page it generates pagefault and OS loads(decompresses) page in memory. That's it.
It can be compressed in RAM, too.
Thanks, cap, this is what I said.
Pretty sure windows has been doing some pretty efficient RAM compression of its own since 98SE or something
They actually just it in Windows 10. There were third party add ons to do so prior to then, but they had marginal impact from my experience.
Did you know that you could do RAM compression on "old" MBP 2013? All you had to do is install Linux and enable memory compression.