Or at least, I guess it is smart. I don’t know anything about anything, but my assumption is that Windows (10) must sort of buffer or remember recently used paths or data to speed the launching of frequently used stuff (?). Case in point - I just loaded X-Plane and it took 1 minute and 50 seconds. Closed it. Relaunched it and it only took 42 seconds to reach the same state. I know that shouldn’t be surprising, but I do find it neat that everything must not get dumped when you close a program. I guess Windows remembers some of the paths or something to gain efficiency in reopening things.
The data was probably still cached in RAM. This is why having tons of RAM is never a bad thing, it won’t clear that out unless you open enough where it actually needs it. Otherwise you will find you have 0% free ram in the resource monitor. Task manager only reports “active” memory in a sense. Resource monitor shows cached memory as “standby” which can be cleared if more is needed for an active program.
Linux has been RAM caching for ages, can’t say when as I am a relative Linux noob but it is by no means a new concept. Linux also dynamically moves it’s ram cache between RAM and pagefile (swap in Linux lingo) depending on how often it’s needed, and even can be configured to bias one way or another. In such respects, MS has been catching up to them for Windows as far as I know.
Edit: On linux you can run the command “free” to see RAM usage with the “buff/cached” column.
What?? I think we need to explain to @Sine_Nomine the honorable, noble, quintessential Mudspike tradition of Thread Derailment.
How else would we have learned of Schrödinger’s Cat, the conspiracy between 5G and chem trails, or Murder by Nuclear Reactor. By “Boldly going where no forum as gone before” we are expanding humanity’s knowledge of life, the universe, and everything…mixing idioms as they have never been mixed before…Oh what Brave New World…indeed thread derailment is as much a part of a Mudspiker’s “DNA” as is pulling @Bogusheadbox’s. chain about F-111s.
Simply put…it is what we do.
So… Do not go gentle into that good night, Derail, Derail! With all your might!
Since I’ve been using Windows 10 I noticed something else - when you copy data between 2 physical drives, let’s say from drive C and paste it to some other drive, it seems like windows is already copying it to that drive, so when you hit paste after few seconds, there is already some portion of files copied. Basically the process is started as soon as hit copy/cut. I’m not sure if it will copy data to several drives if someone have more than two and only continue to do so when user hit paste at specific drive (as doing unnecessary writes on SSDs will lower their lifetime)? Anyone noticed that on their system?
I know Windows will often say it is done copying before it really is. It finishes it up in the background via write caching but doesn’t make you wait for that before it says “done” and lets you do other things.
I DO see that behavior when downloading off the internet. Click Save and you get the window popping up asking where you would like to save it. While you think and navigate it IS downloading in the background. Once you pick the location and click ok you’ll see that some percentage, up to 100% if it is small, already completed while you were doing that.
If I recall back to my early Win32 programming days, Windows will keep certain recently loaded DLL’s in memory (based on the algorithm du jour). I’m sure the Inner Workings, and Hidden Movements have changed since then but the idea probably remains. I notice this especially with DCS. These chunks get removed fairly quick though (a priority scheme I’d guess), or used to.
W10 brokes it’s standby memory handling several updates ago. Usually it’s not a big deal, as W10’s still does a decent job of precaching as everyone has mentioned. However depending on system RAM and program usage (ie DCS) you can hit the limit and then it’s off to a HDD based swap file until it can catch up. Depending on what exactly you’re doing it may never catch up, and your system slows down to a crawl. There is an MS authored tool to manually force a standby memory flush. If they ever get that fixed I will again have few complaints with W10.
