It is quite frustrating whenever you have loads of work to do and suddenly, your computer would just crash or stop loading because of all the applications you have opened on the computer. It takes time to process but even the most powerful computers would have to deal with a few hiccups here and there.
You see, each bit of data is stored by the charge (or lack of it) on a tiny capacitor within the RAM chip. But these capacitors gradually lose their charge over time. To avoid losing the stored data, they must regularly get refreshed to restore the charge (if present) to its original level.
This refresh process involves reading the value of every bit and then writing it back. During this "refresh" time, the memory is busy and it can't perform normal operations like loading or storing bits.
Read more of Marek Majkowski's article to learn about how dynamic RAM works on Cloudflare.
(Image credit: Radoslavkk/Wikimedia Commons)
Comments (1)