Calendar ui size

Posted Aug 7, 2005 10:35 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Our bloat problem by CSEESystems
Parent article: Our bloat problem

It is also a calendar and it has an interface into the evolution-data-server that allows it to display your evolution todo list and your appointments on the calendar. Now all of that in 10 megs. Is that too much? I don't know.

Around 1987 I participated in writing a kind of office system for MS-DOS (commercial proram, but did not go far, very few people ever used it). Memory was tight, as the target was not expected to have more that 768Kb of memory and the network stack took a large chunk of that. Interface was based on textual "forms", not a GUI but close in ease of use. I did the overlay for a simple calendar. Entries were maintained with a simple B-tree database library, with files on a server so several users could consult each other's calendars. If I remember right, my overlay turned out to be the most "bloated" part, at about 20Kb of code (this excludes the DB and forms libraries, which were shared by all overlays of the app) ... and since this was 16-bit "compact" memory model code, everyone's in-RAM data had to fit in 64Kb.

So yes, I think 10Mb is too much for an interface to a calendar server. I agree the above 20kb+64kb would be too little for a modern program, but shouldn't around 10x, like 800Kb for code+data, suffice for even a quite sophisticated user interface? Consider that the entire Windows v2 GUI system could operate in a smaller RAM (640Kb) than that!