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#51
Sorry, but mostly wrong. Not surprising as much of the available documentation regarding standby memory is quite technical and often misunderstood. There is much false information out there and it is often repeated.
This is the basic principle of standby memory:
Freeing memory is quick and easy. On the other hand, loading data from disk, even a SSD, is far more complex and time consuming. Any intelligently designed operating system will try to avoid the latter whenever possible. The memory manager will try to keep data that is even potentially useful in memory until the last possible moment. It will not be made fee until the memory is actually needed for some other purpose. The cost of doing this is near zero and pays big dividends when disk access is avoided.
Standby memory is this potentially useful memory. Much of this won't be used again but enough is to make it very valuable. It is fully available to any process that needs it. Typically the large majority of available memory will be on the standby list. This is normal and good.
It is often claimed that standby memory was first introduced with Vista. That is not correct. It was in Vista that it first made an appearance in standard utilities but it was in the OS long before. The Microsoft publication "Inside Windows 2000" discusses it in detail and there is no mention of it being anything new. I read a paper discussing the design of NT before it was released in 1993 where standby memory was mentioned. I am convinced it was present in NT from the very beginning.
Even then it was not new. NT was largely based on VMS, a successful mainframe OS from the 1980's and later. It had a form of standby memory. It is also present in Linux and the Mac OS under a different name.
Standby memory under whatever term is a mature technology that has been researched and tested for decades.
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