memory usage [LWN.net]

memory usage

Posted Jun 7, 2004 0:18 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)
In reply to: memory usage by ranger
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

How often is xterm's size really a problem anymore? On the list of programs I'm running, FireFox eats up 63M, Pan 21M, Perl 17M, djview 6M, a lost little swf_play process 3M. It's not coming close to hitting swap, and the 7 xterms aren't the first thing I would kill. When I swap, it's because I'm processing 30 megapixel images and the netpbm tools are taking up hundreds of MBs of memory. Unless I've got a lot of xterms open, 2 MB processes don't count.

Is 384 MB of memory really that rare these days? Does it really matter even on a system with less memory?

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memory usage

Posted Jun 8, 2004 7:51 UTC (Tue) by KotH (subscriber, #4660) [Link]

Depends on where you live. In central Europe and the States, it's not
expensive to have a GB of memory (384MB is rather on the lower side ;)
I myself work with 768 (w/o any swap), at work i just got a box with
2.5GB.

But if you live in the second and third world, things are totaly different.
There, a PII is a power machine, 64MB is a lot and a 15" monitor is big.

Unfortunately, most OSS developers live in a region where hardware is
cheap, which means that they dont care whether an application wastes
a MB or not (you have plenty anyways). But this is actualy a problem
if you have to work with under 200MB of ram (had to feel that myself
when i had to use a little bit older laptop)

memory usage

Posted Jun 11, 2004 7:55 UTC (Fri) by leonid (guest, #4891) [Link]

History tends to repeat itself and hardware limitations are about to get back with Linux and other OSS software gaining mobile phones, PDAs and other such devices.