As a Windows user, I'm always surprised to see how conservatively Linux uses its swap area. On Windows, even with enough free memory, it still pages to disk and gives me a sluggish experience.
Does anyone have any idea why Windows is so aggressive about paging disks out compared to Linux?
I can't explain the sluggish experience, but a plausible explanation is that Windows sees a bunch of unused pages, and also a bunch of uncached disk blocks that are used often, and decides that it would be preferable to put those disk blocks in memory in exchange for putting the "unused" memory in swap.
zram in its various incarnations is awesome and has been available in Linux for a few years at least now. It's interesting that Apple is copying it.
Linux gives lots of tuners to adjust swappiness. As far as I know, Microsoft assumes that one (conservative) setting fits all, in typical Microsoft fashion.
As a Windows user, I'm always surprised to see how conservatively Linux uses its swap area. On Windows, even with enough free memory, it still pages to disk and gives me a sluggish experience. Does anyone have any idea why Windows is so aggressive about paging disks out compared to Linux?