A worse lie is memory usage reporting, I think in every major OS it is understated and misreported. In case with Linux, I wanted to know who is using memory, and tried to add PSS values for every process, I never got back the total memory usage. In case with Windows/Mac I judge by screenshot of their tools which show unrealistically small values.

As for the article, the slowdown can be also caused by increased use of shared resources like caches, TLBs, branch predictors.

The memory usage is interesting, where different kind of shared memory is obvious hard to visualize, just two values per process doesn’t say enough.

Most users actually wants a list of ”what can I kill to make the computer faster”, I.e. they want an oracle (no pun) that knows how fast the computer will be if different processes are killed.