My Win7 machine has a lot of RAM but a really slow hard drive. Process Explorer reports that I have 7GB of RAM in the “Zeroed” paging list. Why doesn’t Windows use more of that for disk caching?
On Mac and Linux, I’ve always noticed that the kernel uses nearly all of the free RAM for disk cache, and the performance benefits are very noticeable (pre-SSD anyway). Windows on the other hand seems to do some short-term disk caching but always returns that RAM to the zeroed pool, making my next compile really slow. What gives?
great question for http://superuser.com