Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 7th Oct 2006 17:50 UTC, submitted by PlatformAgnostic
SuperFetch, a new feature of Windows Vista, is designed to intelligently manage memory pages to keep the system responsive even after running background tasks that take a lot of memory. Watch this Channel9 video to see how Vista attempts to form subsets of memory to page together. The speaker also touches on other new kernel-level features such as ReadyBoost and flash-based hibernate.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
...which is not even comparable to what Vista is accomplishing here. The Linux approach is brute force at best.
And you don't think that arbitrarily tracking applications and activity which look popular and shoving them into memory is a brute force measure? What happens when a routine is broken?
It's also just an evolution of previous functionality in Windows XP, where your most popular applications and resources were pre-loaded into memory for you. It's another one of the soundbites regarding new features in a version of Windows that you mysteriously never hear of again once it's released - and then it goes straight on to sites like annoyances.org ;-).
I think many users are going to see an awful lot of inexplicable slow downs with many applications that use a lot of memory, particularly complex games, image editing etc., where SuperFetch feels that it is the time to kick something in. I'm also rather sceptical that people think that pre-loading memory is a good, ground breaking idea. Pre-loading means flushing away cache, so it's not exactly a free operation.
Probably the most important thing related to the whole innovative SuperFetch thing, and memory management in Vista in general, is the fact that they've copied from Linux in terms of what they do with free memory. Linux has the general philosophy that free memory is wasted memory, and tries to cache as much as it can at any one time. Vista attempts to follow this philosophy, and is probably the major difference between earlier versions of Windows.