Could you explain in the form of an analogy? Also, has this improved over time? Does it have anything to do with registry and defrag? Is it different for Mac vs PC? Thank you 🙂
In: Technology
Over time memories build up in your computer, it keeps remembering things it doesn’t need to, making the room to remember new things lower. With that lower room for memories, new programs and files have a harder time finding room for themselves, and so it takes more time to put them somewhere and find them again.
Over time this has gotten better, especially now that we have gigabytes of RAM at our disposal, but it’s still an issue that can and does occur on modern systems, too. I’ve mostly seen it happen on Windows machines, but I’m 100% sure that Macs are affected by it, too.
Defrag is kinda like the memory thing but on your hard drive rather than RAM. As you use your computer things build up in RAM that don’t need to be, and on your HDD as you delete things some things stay in place when they could be moved back to create more sequential room so new programs and their files can live as close together as possible
There are several reasons, but one of the most-common reasons is that everything you do on your computer takes up some of the limited memory in the computer (specifically the RAM, or Random Access Memory, which is different than space on a disk). As you do things on the computer, such as browse Reddit, your computer keeps taking up more memory with every post you click, every photo you view, every link you click. When that memory becomes more limited, your computer operates more slowly, as it struggles to try to “find a place to fit more stuff.” However, once you restart your computer, most of that memory is wiped clean and you start fresh, so your computer is often faster. Basically, on a restart, your computer “empties the trash can,” so you can start filling it up again, without constantly having to try to compact the trash to fit more in the can.
Kay, first thing you need to understand is computers do not ‘remember’ anything. Every time you turn it on it essentially pulls up a checklist/instruction manual that has to reteach it how to do everything it does. Once it’s shut off everything it knew is reduced to 0 and it has to do it all over again when it boots.
Follow that? Cool. Now one of the big reasons for computers slowing down is storage. You’ve got 3 things to worry about: The Hard drive, the CPU and the RAM. The hard drive is basically a rack of file cabinets. It has everything you’ve ever stored in various file folders throughout the cabinets. The CPU is the secretary, she goes around picking up files, putting them away, doing all the actual ‘work.’ The RAM is her desk, the more Ram the bigger her desk is and thus more room to do the actual work.
When you run a program, your asking the CPU to go to the harddrive, pull the relevant files, lay them out on the desk and go do something with them. Each of these takes space; like laying papers and books on your desk. The more things you try and do at once the more space it takes up. If you don’t have enough RAM you run out of space and have to start piling things atop each other, can’t find things, etc. More ram means more desk space meaning you can do 3-4 things at once without as much difficulty.
Likewise the CPU is the speed which they can do those things. You can have a huge friggin desk but if you have a 90 year old lady doing the work it’s still gonna be slow. Same with having a super fast worker but having to work on a dinky little school desk barely large enough for a sheet of paper.
Now as they do stuff the paperwork accumulates. You move stuff around, set this aside to grab that, flip back and forth between 3 different books, stack things atop eachother, etc. As your running out of room it slows everything down because now you’ve got to go find the stuff your need to do the task your working on.
Restarting the computer you’ll recall is essentially putting everything away. It clears everything off the desk, shoves everything back in the file cabinets, and starts over from step 1 and a clean desk. All the clutter that has built up has been thrown away or put away, thus speeding up their work again.
This is also why it fixes so many computer issues. If your doing a complicated Lego model and make a mistake somewhere, it affects everything else after that. Restarting the computer is breaking the model with a hammer and starting over again from step 1, hopefully following the instructions correctly this time. That’s why tech support asks you to start with restarting the computer, since telling the computer ‘Go to step 1 and do it all over again’ will fix most issues.
* Think about a computer like this:
* You are sitting at a large desk next to a huge set of bookshelves.
* You are the CPU
* The table is the system memory (RAM)
* The bookshelves are the system storage (Hard Drive, SSD, external drives etc)
* In order to do something, you need to take the related stuff off the shelf and put it on the table.
* Now think about what this table will look like as you start to do your tasks.
* Computers appear to do many things all at the same time.
* The truth is they only do one thing at a time but very very quickly switch between tasks.
* So the table gets filled with things you’re working on very quickly.
* Switching between these things starts to get time consuming.
* Restarting the computer is the same as putting everything back on the shelf and totally clearing off the table.
* Those first few tasks you do will be quick because you aren’t searching through a table full of stuff to get what you need.
**WELL,**
It’s just like you and sleeping. After lots of work and effort, your mind is full of “junk” from the day, which makes your brain “glitch” and you start doing blunders.
After you go to sleep, you **GO BACK TO WHERE IT ALL STARTED** and when you wake up, you’re clear. You have your mind ‘fresh” and you can start better.
During the day, you use “short term memory” to remember virtually irrelevant stuff/tasks like “*order pizza*”, “*clean the table*”, “*water plants*” etc., that you don’t want to remember afterwards, you wouldn’t remember it, say, in **5 years**.
So, after many small tasks, you start to feel overwhelmed and you start brushing your teeth with your hairbrush because many things are going all around your head.
The next day, you wake up feeling calm and you can start re-filling your mind with activities.
One of your best friends in preventing this is to use the task manager to study what resources are being used. First, disable every application you don’t need from the start file. You don’t need to pre-load your document suite every time you start the computer. You can also run through your services that are starting automatically and change them to open manually. For example, you don’t need a service to read a fingerprint or a credit card when you are just looking at Reddit. But the closest thing to the answer you want is that many programs continue to grow in resources they consume over time. Firefox and other browsers are notorious for this. Firefox might start using 100mb of memory and after some time it’s using almost 1gb. You get a fresh start when you reboot. I run computers 24/7 and maintain full speed by tweaking the resource drains to plug the holes. Your computer does not have to slow down.
Follow up to your question about defrag: You’ll recall the analogy about hard drives being a file cabinet. While it does store the data, it’s not really in the shape of a file cabinet. Instead imagine a grid; letters going across and numbers going up and down.
When it needs to store some information it’ll take, for example, 5 blocks of space. So it’ll just choose A1 – A5 and put them there. But what if one of those blocks is occupied?
Now being human your first instinct would probably be move that occupied one somewhere else and then lay the 5 blocks from the same program all next to each other. The computer doesn’t do that however. The computer uses a firm “Any available surface” method of filing. So if block A4 is already occupied, it’ll choose A1-A3 & A5-A6 to store the information.
But it does this for everything stored on the hard drive. So a visual representation of the hard drive would be less like a filing cabinet, and more like the warehouse from raiders of the lost arc; along with needing a treasure map to find the relevant information when it tries to pull it. [https://static3.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-warehouse.jpg](https://static3.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-warehouse.jpg)
Any time it needs to put down something new it will find anywhere it can cram a part of it and make a note of “I left pieces here, here, here, here and here’ for when it needs to grab them again. That’s where hard drive speed comes in for computer speed, how fast it can go sorting through all those boxes and pulling the relevant info.
Defragmenting the hard drive is when the computer will actually go through and rearrange these boxes into a fashion that makes more sense; grouping bits of data together in actual patterns rather than at random; so when it needs to find something it’s less like following a treasure map and takes less time.
PSA: Solid State Hard drives (SSD) you do not want to defrag. While they are the raiders style of organization, it’s actually carefully controlled so that it distributes wear and tear evenly on the hard drive; improving it’s lifespan. A normal hard drive once a ‘shelf’ breaks it’s corrupted, and can cause more and more problems as it tries to work around that. SSD’s will calculate and arrange things on the fly so prevent any of those shelves holding boxes from getting an unusual amount of wear and tear; meaning they will last longer without breaking. Defragmenting and manually rearranging the load will mess with it’s carefully designed system and put additional strain on portions of the drive, shortening it’s lifespan and eventually leading to damage and failure. A SSD can last much much longer than a spinning drive hard drive because it’s storage method intentionally sets up to keep it going a longer and messing with that can shorten it’s lifespan.
Think about using a computer like a picnic blanket. You turn on the picnic, lay out your food and start eating. After a while you need to pee so you get up. There’s loads of stuff all over the blanket and you have to carefully navigate it to get out – slowing you down. So you decide to restart the blanket by grabbing the corners and flicking all the crap off.
Done. Now you know how to have a picnic.
Over time errors build up either through chance or poor programming causing the use of additional resources, when you reboot everything gets set back to normal.
There is probably not a big difference between Mac and Windows, but windows have historically had a lot of really crap programs written for it and because it’s been much more open than Mac is much more acceptable to random issues. Such as a badly written drives for the cheap video card from who knows where no one should be using vs the video card apple wrote the driver for.
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