• tal@lemmy.today
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    3 hours ago

    As long as you have paging space — and you almost certainly do — in general, an OS should page out pages of memory used by software that isn’t being frequently used.

    It’s possible that the program is allocating memory and then keeps hammering it to keep it resident, but most of the time, a program allocating more memory than it absolutely requires isn’t honestly that big a deal, because the OS will handle it reasonably and just leave it in the pagefile.

    I don’t know what the mechanism is to report this on Windows, but you might try looking in mmc (Windows-R mmc Enter), if that’s still a thing in Windows 11, as it has a bunch of process resource usage graphs.

    On Linux, you’ll probably want to be looking at RSS to find what’s actually in physical memory (well, there can be shared memory and some other things, but RSS is probably a reasonably approximation). You can see this in top.

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    If this is current, Windows probably calls it “Working Set”.