Today I learned two interesting and related facts about memory usage on my computer. (2-3/4 facts, actually)
Fact #1: audio crackling. I use a music streaming service, and over the last few days, the audio had started crackling in an annoying way. I initially thought it might have been a cable issue, so I fooled around with all the physical connections to my Bose subwoofer and speakers. This sometimes seemed to work, sort of. But no, the issue was just intermittent.
From a Quora (!) post, I learned that the culprit could be that I was running tight on memory in the computer. I fired up ye olde Task Manager. Indeed, when I first started it up and when the audio crackling was most evident, I had less than 10% free memory of the 16GB of RAM that's in my laptop.
Time to close some apps! And indeed, closing apps did bring down memory use, which did in turn seem to smooth out the audio. This probably explained why the crackling was intermittent; it coincided with occasions when various apps were really pushing on my RAM limit.
Fact #2: sleeping/discarded browser tabs. A notable memory hog on my computer is Chrome; I have 20+ tabs open at any given time, some of which I use constantly. For example, there's a cluster of tabs that I continually switch between when I'm doing my Old English homework.
I (reluctantly) closed a few tabs, and it did seem to reduce memory use; each tab I closed freed up more RAM. But I didn't want to close all the tabs — these are my emotional-support tabs. haha
However! It turns out that you can put Chrome tabs to sleep, so to speak. (Technically, for Edge the term is "sleep"; Chrome uses the term "discard".) When a tab is asleep/discarded, you still see the tab in the browser window, but it's a kind of placeholder; the content of that tab has been flushed out of memory. When you go back to the tab, the browser reloads the page. Each tab I put to sleep/discarded freed about 2% of memory.
Fact #2-1/2. From this exercise, I also learned about a UI thing I'd noticed. When a browser tab in Chrome is asleep/discarded, sometimes there's a gray dotted circle around the tab name:
Fact #2-3/4. By the way, to discard Chrome tabs, go to chrome://discards and use the links at the right side of the page to discard or load a tab.