
Linux ate my RAM (2009) - Alupis
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
======
kazinator
In 1994, I was doing some Linux contracting for a company whose in-house
programmer suddenly claimed "Linux causes data loss!".

The suspicion was based on copying a large number of small files (static HTML
files generated from a database) on a MS-DOS machine. This was on the order of
several hundred megabytes, IIRC.

On Linux, the disk usage of these files was quite a bit smaller, hence the
suspected data loss.

This is because, of course, the files came from a FAT16 file system, which had
to use large allocation clusters to handle that much data.

He wasn't wrong to be paranoid. I mean, what, Linux had been started by a
student in Helsinki just three years before that, and here was this business
running on it.

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jschwartzi
Well, actually I would love to disable disk caching on my embedded Linux
systems because it's a really common use case that they lose power and I would
like to not have a bunch of data in memory when that happens. Right now I have
to call sync before I do anything with the power or when I come back up
everything I just "copied" is gone.

~~~
mlaretallack
Was about to say this. The disk cache does get in the way when you want to
have realtime response on embedded system. The swapd just seems to cause
issues.

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noicebrewery
I remember when people were whining about this with Windows 7 when it was
doing the same thing.

~~~
Tobba_
Windows 10 is borderline unusable due to it (it evicts RAM _very_ aggressively
to use as disk cache). Doesn't help that their IO scheduler is completely
screwed up too (and they removed the ability to disable NCQ, so disk
performance on HDDs is down the drain).

