Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Tue 22nd Jul 2008 17:54 UTC
David Williams over at iTWire has done a comparison of Windows vs Linux. It is performed by doing functionally identical tasks in both the OSes. This comparison is not a fair one by any measure. The laptops running the Windows and Linux were different in the hardware config and the software used for the tests were comparable but clearly different (MS Office vs OpenOffice; IE vs Firefox 3).
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Member since:
2006-02-15
I guess it depends which application you are going to open. If the application is cached then swap should not be touched. But if you open a new app for the first time then some of the in memory cache has to be put into swap inorder to make room for the new app.
I thought to clear this up a little bit..Cache is just a collection of redundant data that is not _needed_ for anything, it lies in memory just in case something happens to need it. In that regard, if some app wants to f.ex. read a file that is already in the cache memory the system doesn't need to access the disk at all. This boosts the system performance quite a lot.
But, as the data in cache memory is redundant and is there for the "just in case" situations it can all be just thrown away and discarded if you are launching a new app or some pre-existing app needs suddenly more memory. The data in cache will not be written to swap, it's just thrown away completely. Just don't mix this cache with filesystem and I/O read and write cache, they are a different thing.