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Why Boosting Intervals are a Bad Idea
 
Some memory management utilities allow you to "boost" your memory at specific time intervals. For example, you could boost your memory every 15 or 30 minutes, every hour, and so on. People ask why MemoryBoost does not support this feature. Why not allow QuickBoost to be scheduled every thirty minutes? This article addresses that question.

As you may have observed, boosting takes a lot of energy out of your computer. You'll notice that your computer slows down when you run QuickBoost, that MemoryBoost is designed carefully to avoid boosting when you're using your computer. It will interrupt only when memory is dangerously low; otherwise, it will let you work in peace. The reason for this is clear--a program designed to improve your computer's performance cannot afford to do something that would be detrimental to performance. Much of the power of MemoryBoost is invested in choosing when to boost, not just how much to boost.

Because boosting is so expensive, in terms of computation resources, it must be used judiciously. Technically speaking, boosting is only effective when your computer really needs it. You can test this yourself; try boosting your memory over and over again, you'll see it converge to a certain point. Because of the expense of boosting and its effectiveness being entirely dependent on how much free memory you have, it only makes sense to boost when boosting will recover a significant amount of memory. Here you're paying a price (your computer is slowing down) but you're getting a clear benefit (your memory is freed). Sometimes MemoryBoost can even get out of paying the price--if you're away from your computer, for example, you'll never know that boosting slowed down your computer for a few seconds. MemoryBoost works hard to estimate the expected benefit and the expected cost. It wants to provide the greatest benefit to you while incurring the least discomfort.

Boosting at specific intervals is effectively the cheap way of doing what MemoryBoost does really well. When you boost at a specific time interval, you're ignoring the entire cost / benefit calculation. Boosting may not gain you anything (you may already have a maximal amount of free memory), and it will certainly extract a price. Since MemoryBoost always boosts your memory when you need it, boosting at intervals will never do a better job. At best, it'll boost at the same time MemoryBoost would have, in which case they'd be exactly the same. At worst (and this is what happens most of the time), your memory doesn't change on an exact schedule and boosting at intervals will often boost when you're working or you don't need memory, slowing down your computer.

Part of the power of MemoryBoost is that you don't have to oversee its operation. It will intelligently choose to boost your memory when you need it most, getting you the best possible performance. Of course, MemoryBoost lets you QuickBoost whenever you want. But there is no need to set up a schedule, or otherwise direct MemoryBoost. It is much smarter than that; it uses an advanced algorithm to schedule itself, much more advanced than simply watching the clock. For this reason, we don't offer the ability to QuickBoost at certain intervals. There is absolutely no performance to be gained by offering this feature, and it would confuse the user--MemoryBoost is designed to know when to boost, so offering such a feature would imply that you, the user, have to determine when MemoryBoost should boost your memory. MemoryBoost is designed to take this responsibility on itself. Straight out of the box, MemoryBoost is configured to work with your computer, your software, your memory and your operating system to exact the highest level of performance.