
As Chrome OS continues to grow and mature, you may find yourself in a position to start using it for more heavy lifting. As more and more features roll out to Chrome OS-like Linux apps and virtual desktops-your uses may start to get heavier. It’s also worth thinking about how long you plan on having your Chromebook. While 8 GB is generally more than enough for nearly all users, the heaviest of users may want to even look at 16 GB systems-which are still few and far between at this point (but they do exist!)

It’s probably cheaper than something with beefier specs anyway.īut if you plan on getting a Chromebook to use as your primary machine for work, school, play, and more, then you’ll likely want to spring for more RAM. If this will be a coffee table machine that you plan on using for light browsing, email, social networking, and the like, then, by all means, go for the 4 GB model. When it comes to getting what’s going to work best for you, however, you need to take a look at how you plan on using your Chromebook.įor example, if this is going to be a supplemental machine-something you use in tandem with your “main” computers-then you might not need a workhorse of a system. The standard across most systems has been 4 GB for the longest time, but we’re also starting to see an uptick in ‘books with 8 GB. Some Chromebooks come with as little as 2 GB of RAM, while others come with as much as 16 GB. Of course, that’s not to say that there’s no such thing as “too little RAM” on a Chromebook-there absolutely is. If it does happen, it’s generally because of some other type of error-like a fast memory leak. The good news is that this rarely happens anymore-once the soft wall is hit, purging background items usually does the trick to prevent the hard wall from ever getting hit. When that happens, Chrome will generally crash.

The second wall of this “double-wall” system is the “hard wall.” This is when the system is entirely out of RAM, and the kernel’s Out of Memory (OOM) killer is triggered. In other words, it systematically tries to close processes that it assumes the users aren’t interested in first, before becoming increasingly more aggressive. It begins with tabs that were opened but haven’t been seen, then moves to background tabs that haven’t been clicked/typed/scroll in, then background tabs, and finally, the foreground tab.

The basic gist is that a “soft wall” is set in RAM, where, once reached, the OS starts to purge older activities. Google also makes the most of RAM in Chrome OS by using something called a “double-wall” low memory state.

The “Double-Wall” Low Memory State Keeps Things Tidy Because the compression happens on the fly in zRAM and RAM is generally quicker than swap, Chrome OS can do a lot more with less. The result is a much faster, more efficient use of RAM. This compressed virtual memory goes a long way in making the best of lower RAM by creating a compressed block in RAM and using that in place of virtual memory, which is generally stored on the hard disk (and thus, slower).ĭata is then transferred in and out of this compressed space as needed until it’s full, at which point the swap space (virtual RAM on the hard disk) is used.
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Chrome OS uses something called “zRAM” to keep things snappier than a Windows machine or Mac with less RAM.
