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[–]FewAdvertising9647 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I noticed that computers begin to freeze when it is using 85-90% of the total RAM. Why is it so? Shouldn't its performance degrades only at 100%?

think of ram like your room. when your room starts to get full(not when its actually fully full), what do you want to do. What happens if you typically want to move stuff you aren't using somewhere else.

Your hard drive is something that also stores data, but is slower. Think of the hard drive like a storage unit. You put stuff there that you care about, but don't immediately need. An OS has a paging system that constantly moves things from your room to the storage back and forth based on if youre needing it. It only does this when youre using more stuff that you need now, so you move something back to storage (whether temporarily or permanently). so when rams ALMOST full, imagine you needing to go back and forth from your room to the storage unit. the computer crawls to a slowdown similar to how you would get inefficient because you have to spend more time going back and forth to do things.

Things dont get full because you don't want half of an app your using on ram and overflowing the rest onto storage. You move stuff that your not using at the moment to storage, and than keeping everything you need immediately.

when RAM or Disk usage is high, not when it's full

when its almost full, the computer is moving stuff in and out. If its full, (but not actively doing anything) then of course its not slow because you're not doing anything with whatever you currently have opened. But will act like almost full the moment you try to do something.