On: Tired of explaining Linux's seemingly obtuse memor...

[barrkel]

It costs time to zero pages; disk cache pages are not zeroed. Not having a source of zero pages will add latency to large memory allocation requests.

(The pages must be zeroed to avoid the security problem of snooping on data you might not have access to.)

[slavak → barrkel]

Exactly the kind of thing users not familiar with the way Linux handles memory DON'T consider when they check how much free memory they have. If you're the sort of person concerned with the overhead of zeroing pages then you can look at more detailed memory-usage info to find the details you're looking for.