system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Why does closing applications cause your pc to hang more when it is freeing up space in ram?
gpt
Closing an application *correctly* takes work. The application needs to save any work you're doing (which can consume more RAM), save your current preferences (which can consume more RAM), find and close any handles to resources it has open (which can trigger processes that consume more RAM), and a bunch of other things that leave the computer in a nice state but take work to do. Worse, the "shutdown" parts of the program are infrequently used so they aren't in RAM when you close it, which means the computer has to make room in RAM, then move those parts of the program to RAM before it can start!

Imagine a desk that's completely covered with toys and supplies and paperwork. Cleaning it off is very slow at first, because you'll have to move some things around just to find things that should go together. A desk that's already almost clean is very easy to finish cleaning off. RAM's the same way. The more crowded it gets, the more likely doing anything to deal with the problem is going to make things a little worse before they get better.