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Comment by cullend | Hacker News Reader

So basically the same thing Vista was doing (prefetch, and admittedly it did a shitty job with >1GB ram), except since its Linux, Oh its all fine guys, we won't destroy the OS' reputation.

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The page is about explaining a correct behavior, not justifying some bogus memory usage. There's no reputation at stake. All modern operating systems are expected to behave that way, free RAM is wasted RAM.

Right, the only thing wrong with Windows Vista was its RAM caching strategy.

Maybe not, but there were a lot of people needlessly going bonkers over the disk light blinking (SuperFetch) and free memory numbers in the task manager(exactly the same problem that the referenced site is trying to explain).

See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/why-does-vista-use-...

I dare say Vista did a plenty good job of destroying its reputation without anyone batting an eyelash at this.

Linux has been doing this for a lot longer than Windows has. (Which I only actually know because there was so much FUD about Vista's pre-fetching when it came out.)

edit: Sorry, getting prefetching and SuperFetch confused.

Unix has been doing it... You talk as if Linus personally invented the idea of caching.

Doing what? Prefetching? It has been there since XP.It is not just simple caching. Windows probably was doing caching even before Linux existed.

What Vista does is SuperFetch and I don't think it's there in Linux even now, except that someone wrote a program that would do a similar thing but it's not really used that much.

MS shipped SMARTDRV with DOS 4.01, which shipped in 1989. By my reckoning, Windows (running on DOS) has had disk caching since before Linux existed.

Prefetching is not the same as caching. Vista's SuperFetch is even more different.

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