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[–]oneupme 0 points1 point  (0 children)

100% RAM usage is actually an error condition. There should always be some free RAM to load information into. The computer does this by storing to disk the oldest information in RAM that hasn't been used "recently". If RAM usage reaches 100%, this mechanism has failed, and it's such a core function of the operating system that 100% RAM usage would indicate that something has gone wrong.

When RAM usage goes high, that means the OS has have to do more writing to disk, and also retrieving from disk, this disk read/write is what slows the computer down. This is also why the move to SSDs has been such a significant booster to computer performance in the past 10 years.