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Originally Posted by ajac
why not? For ram to be occupied it means the CPU has to be doing somethign ram just doesnt get used for no reason.
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Well, for the data set to get placed *into* ram the CPU must be used. However, it can remain in ram and if nothing is working with the data set then no CPU operations are required to keep it in RAM.
RAM gets used by any application in non sequential fashion. It is entirely possible that data in RAM is out dated or was placed there by a program that has since been closed or is sitting idle (which is why programs reading from an incorrect memory address exhibit sometimes unpredictable results).
However, having that data in ram doesn't require any further cpu operations.
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whenever I see more ram used it also means more processor used.. and I wish we had somethign showing how much processor is being used like on windows vista/7
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What you may see is that extra work is required validating that the current state of the data in memory is no longer needed so that it is then dirtied/swapped out to allow for newer data to be placed in the same memory location. This occurs when there is not enough free memory (the limit may be less than 100%) to place the required data set into memory or garbage collection occurs. This threshold is going to be determined by the memory manager (and 6.1's is really not very good).
So, with a large amount of used memory you may see extra CPU cycles used when new data has to be written into memory locations that are already occupied by old/stale data, but the actual storage of the current data (assuming it's not being used and nothing is being written to those locations) does not in itself cause any extra CPU usage.