Just curious about it, but can’t understand why is it like that.
In: 7
Basically, the long term storage in your hard drive is very slow and the incredibly fast memory your processor can use for very short term storage is, by necessity, very limited.
Programs pretty much universally have data that they want to store to be able to access quickly. These are generally interim data the program needs in order to run right now, not things that the program wants to save for later. Oftentimes the amount of data needed is quite large. RAM is purpose built to fill this role: fast to access yet relatively abundant.
As for why some programs use more or less, it really depends. Some programs need to store a lot more data in order to function. Your high end video game needs to store a lot more data than a plain text document. However, it’s often just a choice by the programmer (i.e., ‘my program will use lots of memory but that’s ok due to the context it will be run in’) or just simply the programmer caring more or less about how efficiently the program uses memory. There may be very compelling cost or efficiency reasons to build software that uses lots more RAM than it “should.”
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