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[MultimediaMan]

Leech: this was only during renders, I was watching it in realtime.

Linux will use all of it's available momery before it will cache, Windows uses a very different approach to cache.

[leech]

Yeah, I noticed, and I've bitched about it ever since! Why is it when I have 256mb of Free physical Ram and it's using 200 MB of virtual ram, I'll never know. Virtual Ram of course being a billion times (or something like that) slower. Linux hardly ever even goes into using the swap space, unless i have a ton of things loaded. (for instance, right now I have VMware, running WindowsXP, Galeon, Synaptic, ed2k_gui, Gaim, GnomeICU, and the Gnome 2.4 and still only have tapped 30% of swap, and 96% of my 512mb of RAM. (I think my swap space was 800mb or so)).

Leech

[gt40]

windblows xp seems to really go into swap prematurely - sometimes its frustrating watching that little hardrive light go on and off with a simple aplication, all the time I'm thinking 'what the fork are you doing?'

[MultimediaMan]

Without wandering too far OT:

Many people, knowing how Unix/Linux handles RAM with regards to cache want to make the Windows Pagefile.sys behave in the same manner: Big Mistake.

For a decent treatise on how Windows Cache works, read about it here (This dude writes device drivers in his sleep):

http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10062

Having a bunch of cache in RAM can also hurt Unix/Linux, particularly if ever there is a runaway process. I see it almost daily: a hung process or one that starts dumping errors to a log file at a frightening rate bringing the box to a grinding halt, or surging like a car with water in the gas. Fortunately, it is usually fairly easy to trace and correct the problem, and restore things close to normal in a short period of time.

It really is half one way, 50% the other depending on how you choose to look at how they handle cache.