Bloat [LWN.net]

Bloat

Posted Jul 27, 2007 0:16 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)
In reply to: Still waiting for swap prefetch by tomsi
Parent article: Still waiting for swap prefetch

> I am writing this on a Dell laptop with a 1GHz CPU and 512MB of memory.

You say that like you think that is a small machine. It shouldn't be, and that is the problem.

I remember running early GNOME based RedHat distributions on 300Mhz machines with 128M and it being totally usable. Bumped it to 256MB and could run Win95 under VMWare. (Gave Windows 64MB)

Now look at the pitiful state of bloat we have. Anaconda pretty much requires 512MB now unless you install in text mode. Red Hat won't even support a RHEL machine without a full GB. And I know ps's memory stats aren't all that reliable but look at the memory and CPU needs to bring up a GNOME or KDE desktop and a browser.

And speaking of insane, take a look at conglomerate. I have a test machine loaded up with F7 (Athlon64 2800 with 512MB) and tried using conglomerate to open up the Fedora 7 comps.xml file. After several minutes of constant thrashing went by as the poor machine exhausted all memory and swap the OOM killer finally put it out of it's misery. This is a 0.9 release so I'm assuming this sort of memory performace isn't considered a show stopper bug. More likely none of the devels (who by definition have big enough machines to compile a hog like Conglomerate) noticed the memory consumption.

I think the problem probably stems from the same source as Window's bloat. The developers no longer feel the pain. Ten years ago many key developers on every part of the stack from kernel to desktop (browser excluded prior to Mozilla becoming viable...) were private individuals, with a fair number outside the US/western Europe. The upshot of that was that they had hardware closer to a 'typical' machine. Now most of the key developers are using machines bought with OPM, i.e. corporate developer 'workstations' with big honking specs.

Perhaps the key developers should be given a $1,500 budget to buy their workstation with and then give them assess via ssh to a 'compile host' so they don't have to sit and spin waiting for compiles but DO have to sit and spin waiting on OO.o or Firefox. This would motivate them to care about resource consumption in more realistic desktop environments and not just care how well their quad Opteron monster squeezes the last percentage from all of it's CPUs.

(Log in to post comments)

Bloat

Posted Jul 29, 2007 21:35 UTC (Sun) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

>Perhaps the key developers should be given a $1,500 budget to buy their workstation with

Err... you can get 2GB of memory for < $100 these days. From a glance at dell.com, right now $550 low-end desktops come with 1GB of memory default, and $750 ones with 2GB. There are still real cases where memory is limited (embedded devices, OLPC, people living in non first-world countries, ...), but your scale seems a bit miscalibrated.

Bloat

Posted Aug 6, 2007 20:49 UTC (Mon) by happycube (guest, #42855) [Link]

The real problem is with older hardware - it's impossible to get more than 512MB in an i815-based P3, for instance.

Bloat

Posted Aug 9, 2007 2:28 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

I really hate this notion that a three year old computer should be tossed in the trash as so obsolete there is no use it can be put to. Linux used to be a good way to get good use out of older hardware. Not anymore. Now you need hardware equal to, and prior to Vista shipping greater than, the minimum Windows baseline.

And just throwing hardware at the problem doesn't make it go away. Having 2GB of RAM will make it livable but hard drives aren't getting all that much faster. Paging in enough of OO.o and all the libraries it needs to get to mapping the initial window means looking at a throbber almost as long on a hot new monster PC as it does on an older one. Same for all the disc thrashing involved in logon as multi-megabyte blobs of libraries and executables are mapped in to provide what should be small crap like battery indicators and CPU speed monitor widgets in menu bar.

Having more resources is no excuse for sloppy and wasteful practices. And if we want our stuff to be an option for the coming world of smart phones, flash based laptops (without swap) and the embedded world we need to be thinking about getting our act together now.