Re:DRAM Prices in ‘Freefall’
by Jach on Thursday March 07, 2019 @04:31PM
(#19332685)
That's not what GP meant, the analogous situation is loading GBs of data into a database, resulting in a GBs sized file on disk. If you truncate the data, it's gone, but the database won't actually shrink the file on disk unless you vacuum too. Chrome might not be using all the memory it has claimed, but it's not necessarily releasing all that it can back to the system either.
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> but it's not necessarily releasing all that it can back to the system either.
That's exactly the point of swapping. Memory which was not used in a (relatively) long time is taken away forcefully from the process if there is memory pressure on the system.
So it doesn't matter if Chrome releases it or not, it will be taken away if it just sits there.
Re:DRAM Prices in ‘Freefall’
by pritambaral on Friday March 08, 2019 @06:09AM
(#19336589)
> is taken away forcefully
To disk. Waiting for the memory a badly behaved app overzealously ate up without using to finish flushing to disk before being able to use it is worse than simply having the memory readily available. This is why I always disable swap, opting to let bad processes die, sometimes even pulling the trigger myself.