> No one pays for the extra free gigabyte that Chrome takes over.
Sure they do. It just doesn’t show up in Chrome’s metrics so Chrome doesn’t care about it.
* Start-up time of other applications. If a program needs 1 GB of RAM, and Chrome is holding all but 512 MB, then the program must perform multiple allocations, waiting for Chrome to release its cache after each one.
* Smaller cache in other programs. Consider a program that can run with 4 MB of RAM, but could use up to 1 GB of RAM to cache intermediate results and improve performance. Such a program would check the amount of RAM available and scale their own cache size accordingly.
* Competing caches in multiple Chrome instances. Multiple independent Chrome instances, such as from Electron shells, each try to cache as much as possible until RAM is exhausted.
Sure they do. It just doesn’t show up in Chrome’s metrics so Chrome doesn’t care about it.
* Start-up time of other applications. If a program needs 1 GB of RAM, and Chrome is holding all but 512 MB, then the program must perform multiple allocations, waiting for Chrome to release its cache after each one.
* Smaller cache in other programs. Consider a program that can run with 4 MB of RAM, but could use up to 1 GB of RAM to cache intermediate results and improve performance. Such a program would check the amount of RAM available and scale their own cache size accordingly.
* Competing caches in multiple Chrome instances. Multiple independent Chrome instances, such as from Electron shells, each try to cache as much as possible until RAM is exhausted.