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by nikanj 2757 days ago
Why do you need 8x more memory for Windows? The NT kernel isn’t 8x worse than Linux, not even close.
2 comments

It's a philosophical difference. NT doesn't do overcommit. In theory overcommit is dangerous (and if you decide that matters you can tell Linux not to do it) but in practice it's usually a huge RAM saving.

If your apparent virtual size is 2.6GB but there's actually only 240MB of resident memory, Linux will run on 256MB of RAM. NT requires enough RAM for the entire 2.6GB plus overheads.

This is especially frustrating if you have orchestration services that would have recovered from the unlikely event of OOM since avoiding OOM is literally the only reason for NT's choice.

Personally, I've run small LAMP stacks on VPS's with 256 MB RAM and without major issues. Running a web server on a Windows VPS usually requires more than that (albeit not 8 time as much.