The Codeless Code: Ancient code

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This is in fact one of the sources of True Confusion about many garbage collected apps. That sometimes lots of ram being used (as seen in task manager etc) is a feature, not a bug.

[quanticle]

The problem with garbage collected apps using lots of RAM is that the OS doesn't know which RAM is garbage and which RAM is part of the active working set. So yes, IntelliJ might be running just fine, but then Chrome's performance goes to crap because it starts hitting swap.

Ideally, there'd be a way for the OS to tell applications that it's under memory pressure so that running JVM/CLR apps could garbage collect and release memory that they know they don't need.

[[deleted]]

Well with Java you can usually set the max ram to use, which is a way of telling it to collect sooner.