Re:Surface Go 2, Surface Book 3, Surface Headphones 2 and Su...
by zozbot234 on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @01:56PM
(#23094200)
Current mobile OS's (iOS and Android) do run without a pagefile, in order to cope with the crappiness of inbuilt eMMC storage which would quickly wear out as the pagefile got rewritten. Theoretically, well-behaved applications are supposed to checkpoint their own internal state when signaled by the OS to do so, since this ought to be more space-efficient than the use of a pagefile; in practice, almost no applications actually do this properly.
For what it's worth, Linux is a lot more parsimonious in its use of swap space than Windows, given very similar hardware and use cases.
Re:Surface Go 2, Surface Book 3, Surface Headphones 2 and Su...
by pmjordan on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @02:34PM
(#23094647)
Of course, modern iPhones and iPads actually come with fully fledged NVMe SSDs. So it's not really clear why that decision hasn't been revisited - or why Apple hasn't at least introduced some kind of process hibernation which fully restores background processes when switching back.
Re:Surface Go 2, Surface Book 3, Surface Headphones 2 and Su...
by ridiculous_fish on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @08:09PM
(#23098068)
This would seem to be necessary for any serious multitasking workflow on an iPad Pro.
On the iPad, opening a couple more browser tabs and then coming back to the original tab might cause the page on the original tab to reload. This could be very frustrating on sites like HN or Reddit. I might start typing a comment, and in the middle of that need to look up some things to fact check myself or get some references. Do that, go back to the comment--and the damn page reloads, wiping out what I'd typed so far.
Anticipating this, I could "select all" on my comment and copy it, then go do the research, and then come back. If the page reloads then I could just paste the comment back. If I needed to copy and paste something from the other page it was usually safe to do at that point. Just switching between two already loaded pages usually would not trigger a reload.
I never ran into anything like that on SP4. I could pause writing an HN comment and research in other tabs as much as I wanted, and never had the partial comment gone when I switched back.
I don't know if this is because Windows will use a pagefile and/or swapfile when there is not enough physical RAM for everything, or because the SP4 had 16 times as much RAM as my 3rd gen iPad so I simply never got it low enough on RAM, but for whatever the reason browsing worked a lot better the SP4.
Since then I also got a 6th gen iPad (not Pro). It's much better than my old 3rd gen was about this, but still does occasionally force a refresh when witching among tabs.