The benefit of having unused RAM is that every program you are using can remain in memory for quick multitasking access and when you go to launch a new program it can be loaded into that unused RAM without unloading any of the currently running programs. What part about that is a misunderstanding? Would the user be better off if the application in focus aggressively reserved RAM it didn’t need to slow down every other running application? Because that’s what Photoshop does
Consumer software running on a consumer OS should not be grabbing all available RAM just because. Doing so will cause other applications to be moved to swap and have to be loaded back into RAM when the user goes to use them. In a server environment doing something like running a SQL server it would make more sense to grab all available RAM and start aggressively caching frequently accessed data in RAM to present it sooner with the assumption that the server’s primary role is to perform SQL operations as quickly as possible.
Specifically with Photoshop what would be the benefit of it be aggressively reserving RAM beyond what is needed to function?
This is only remotely true if you have a box dedicated to doing one single thing and nothing else. That is almost certainly not the case for the vast majority of Photoshop users
Lemmy is such a rad place, I love it here