Refreshing the computer is something we always do while working on the computer. Actually, it is not as much as we think, it is something that we do automatically as a habit. But what most people don’t know is what happens when the computer is refreshed in this way. Or some other people think that when the computer is refreshed, the computer’s temporary memory (RAM) is cleared and the computer’s performance increases.
But this is wrong ❗
Whenever we refresh the computer, the RAM is not cleared and the performance does not increase. So what is really going on here?
Let's talk about the refresh option first
You know that computers did not have a user interface(UI) in early days. The UI was added to computers only later. At the same time, another problem that came up is that the UI works on Frames.
“To explain more simply, what happens is, that a static view is created for the UI from the library and, is rendered and sent to the monitor. Then, another static view is also rendered and sent to the screen. This process keeps happening again and again which we called the frame. Which is also called frame draw rate, a frame per second, in another word “FPS rate.”
Although it was easy to explain this way, it was not easy for the developers to design and build it. Because, at that time, the hardware has not had a high performance like nowadays. So, the developers came together and created different ways to optimize this hardware and software.
You know how many things are there even when you take the desktop of your computer. There are many things like desktop wallpaper, icons, task bar, start menu. We call these UI components, each of these components are drawn in separate frames. That means, in one rendering call, the ham component that you see on the screen should be called. This is called a draw call, and as the number of draw calls increases, the time for these components to grow also increases. At the same time, your FPS rate drops and you get stuck between animations or the mouse point gets stuck and doesn’t move. Perhaps you have had similar experiences.
Now you may have a problem. Why is this draw call loaded separately for each component? The reason for that is that this rendering technique works exactly like a canvas. It means that the other component is drawn on top of one component and first the wallpaper is drawn on top of it like the desktop icons and task bar. These work like layers. This method is already used in your computer.
There is another optimize technique made like this. There is something slightly different from what was explained earlier. Check whether there has been a change in the components currently drawn on the desktop and redraw only the component that has changed. The component that needs to be drawn anew is called a dirty object. Then the CPU only needs to render a dirty component, we don’t need to load all the components like in the previous method.
But this method was a bit flawed. Sometimes if the CPU is overloaded, the dirty object can be skipped without being rendered. If that happens, you won’t see any difference on the computer. Now comes to the main topic.
What happens with this refresh option?
What actually happens with this refresh option is to redraw every component in the window we are working on at that time. But since the hardware and software of the current computers have improved a lot, this refresh option is almost useless for us. But even today there is a possibility of skipping a draw call like this, so you can still see the refresh option on computers. Simply put, what happens with this refresh option is that our window is completely redraw.
If we take an example and explain this process completely..
I am creating a text file renamed like this in a folder created on my desktop. You know that this file is sorted in alphabetical order. Create another new text file and rename it as B. According to the alphabetical order, it should come under the letter A. But you can see that when it was created, it was at the end, but when I refreshed it, its position changed and it was set in alphabetical order.
After that, if you make another one called D, but that’s it. If you create another file called F here, close the window without refreshing it and open it again, but it has gone to the same position. That means, even if you don’t refresh manually, it will be automatic. That’s why I told you earlier that the refresh option is not of much use.
You must have come to understand about the refresh option that you thought would speed up the computer for so long.
Comment any other tech questions you have. We are ready to share those things from the Chama Tech Post series as posts on our page for everyone to know!
So see you again with another important post like this!
