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Windows Memory Manager To Introduce Compression

Posted by Soulskill on from the start-with-my-browser dept.

jones_supa writes: Even though the RTM version of Windows 10 is already out of the door, Microsoft will keep releasing beta builds of the operating system to Windows Insiders. The first one will be build 10525, which introduces some color personalization options, but also interesting improvements to memory management. A new concept is called a compression store, which is an in-memory collection of compressed pages. When memory pressure gets high enough, stale pages will be compressed instead of swapping them out. The compression store will live in the System process's working set. As usual, Microsoft will be receiving comments on the new features via the Feedback app.

4 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great by viperidaenz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except swapping to disk

  2. OSX in 2013. by Henriok · · Score: 5, Informative

    Welcome to 2013! as it was then compressed memory was introduced in Mac OS X.

    --

    - Henrik

    - when the Shadows descend -
    1. Re:OSX in 2013. by MSG · · Score: 5, Informative

      http://askubuntu.com/questions...

      That document is several years old now.

      Oh, so it's not enabled by default in my distro?

      It appears to be enabled currently in both Ubuntu, Fedora, and RHEL and CentOS.

      Oh, great, it's experimental.

      It was marked experimental in 2013. In the context of a discussion about a feature that hasn't even been introduced in Windows, it's fair to note that Linux developers have been working on such a feature, and made it generally available several years earlier.

      Wonderful! If I turn it on, it may suddenly turn itself off when I get a kernel update for 14.04.

      It was disabled in Ubuntu while they tried to diagnose instability in a PPC kernel. The feature was not related to the instability.

      If you don't like Ubuntu's method of kernel maintenance, by all means, use a different distribution. However, the practices of one company should not be considered a defect in *Linux*.

      Saying you have something when it's experimental, not enabled by default, enables and disables with updates, and not easily available to the vast majority of your users is silly.

      It would be, perhaps, but you have all of your facts wrong.

  3. Compressed swap isn't all it's cracked up to be by Theovon · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have a Mac and have therefore had compressed swap for some time now. Theoretically, it's much faster than swap, even if you have an SSD. But there's a tradeoff. When swapping, the disk is busy, but the CPU is free to do other work, although things bog down a lot when thrashing happens. When doing compressed swap, the memory management hogs the CPU, which means it's not free to run other programs, and the system slows down. And thrashing still happens. It's just that your laptop heats up more when it's happening, and things don't get any less sluggish.

    Of course, the biggest problem is Safari. I'll get Safari Web Content processes taking up 10GB or more. There's obviously some kind of run-away memory leak going on. Always when my system bogs down, it's Safari that's taking up too much RAM. Quit Safari, and the system becomes responsive again.