When we talk about “memory” we’re talking about RAM. It’s a common misunderstanding, so I want to clear it up: memory and disk space are two different things.Ī quick rule-of-thumb: disks contain the information stored on your computer that is preserved when you turn off the power memory, or more correctly RAM, is where programs and data reside when they are in use, but the moment you turn your computer off RAM is erased. A good, but inexact indicator might be the size of the Quicken files themselves. If you’re working with a large database of Quicken data, it’s conceivable that it could use a lot of memory. Programs like Quicken could fall into the same category. Other programs can often also take advantage of additional memory in the same way. Games are a good example – if written properly, a game can keep information in memory for significantly faster access than if it had to read that information from disk. If a good citizen program uses a lot of memory, there’s a reason, and in most cases, the reason is performance.
That’s an oversimplified definition of program that’s a good citizen. It also releases memory for use by other programs when it’s no longer needed. Instead, it simply uses only the memory it needs, and no more. Your situation – everything just working with relatively low memory usage – is actually much more common.Ī well-written program doesn’t actually pay attention to available memory. I’d have to agree that someone’s a memory hog in that situation, but it might not be FireFox itself. There are lots of reasons one might want multiple gigabytes of memory, but it shouldn’t really be for something as simple as FireFox. They use however much they need, almost regardless of how much you actually have, and therein lies the source of most memory-related slowdowns.
No, programs don’t typically expand to fill all available memory.
0 kommentar(er)
