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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.
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