Somewhat uncritical article

We spent 3 months to get it down to a reasonable size (as this was the days of Pentium 60's) but basically ended up with shipping the large product because the 'optimizations' kept making it look like crap.

Heck, want to speed and smallify up Linux.. dictate that the world uses ASCII C only as K&R meant it to.

-rwxr-xr-x  1 nix users 1165752 Nov  3 09:55 32/libcrypto.so.0.9.7
-rwxr-xr-x  1 nix users 1398112 Nov  3 09:55 64/libcrypto.so.0.9.7

There is also something to be said for the average quality of programmers in 1980 versus the average quality today. There are more good programmers, but it's more common to have one good and five bad programmers writing your product, than two good programmers. Or sometimes just five bad programmers. On the other hand, we have a lot more software.

A quick look in the memory map shows that about half of it is used by the clock applet itself (HEAP+STACK). The rest is used by the non-readonly segments (and so non-shared) of the shared libraries.

About pmap, it would be great if the linux pmap printed more details about the maps like the Solaris pmap -x:

Address Kbytes Resident Shared Private Permissions Mapped File
00010000 1688 1616 1616 - read/exec emacs
001C4000 4904 4816 1208 3608 read/write/exec emacs
...

This way you more more exactly how memory is used.

The Linux filesystem is organized into a vaguely tree-like recursive structure, demand-paged and cached in RAM.

Performance-wise there isn't much difference unless you're using a braindead filesystem. The frequently accessed and recently modified stuff will be in RAM, and everything else won't.

It would be better to tweak the demand-paging of the executables. Reading 4K at a time according to quasi-random execution paths is stupid when it's faster to read 500K of data from disk than it is to read 4K, seek 492K ahead, and read 4K.

I'll believe that when I see a profile.

(Which, in my opinion, was rather the point of this article. Stop complaining and start profiling. That's how we'll get rid of "bloat".)

Some people are alive today because of airbags--I doubt they would consider them bloat. OTOH, some people do complain about airbags, although they don't use the word "bloat" to describe it ("dangerous" and "explosive" come to mind).

Sometimes software gets better when it gets bigger. A 6809 machine running a 1.87MHz processor doesn't have a complicated buffer cache subsystem, because it would be slower to read and cache data than to reread it from disk every time it is requested and copy it into a cache; however, a P4 machine running a 3.0GHz processor turns a complicated buffer cache subsystem into huge average-case improvements in I/O subsystem performance. Very few users would consider disk cache to be bloat on a modern machine (maybe people who write bootloaders that must share 512 total bytes of binary with a partition table, or embedded systems which use alternatives to cache, like execute-in-place, or high-end database systems which regard *everything* between the backend and the disk as bloat).

Often, bigger software is just bloated. Program A that performs a task in 1000 steps in a loop is generally slower than Program B that performs the same task in only 500 steps, all else being equal. No amount of spiffy new hardware can change the fact that program A is still twice as slow as program B on the same machine. The complaints about bloat start when program A fails to demonstrate useful improvements over program B, especially when program A is new and typically doesn't do everything that program B does.

And why shouldn't people complain when, all else being equal, someone proposes replacing their existing working software with something slower, larger, and more broken? Even entirely new software is bloated if its runtime cost far exceeds reasonable technical requirements for the problem it solves. It's one thing to say "it has a lot of new capabilities", but the people who are complaining care more about things they're doing now, than things they could do at some future time.

The text editor I used in 1991 (vi) is the same text editor I use in 2005, but its performance relative to CPU clock rate has been largely unchanged during that time (with the convenient side-effect that it is now 200 times faster than it was 14 years ago, or put another way, I can start editing a 200MB file today in the same time I used to need to load a 1MB file).

Today I expect a text editor to fit in well under 1MB of RAM (not including the file being edited of course), support all the editing operations vi does, and go from "zero RAM usage" to "editing a 50MB text file" in three seconds or less. It's possible to double the startup speed of vi by removing the recovery feature, so I'm already tolerating nearly 50% overhead in that standard. Anything slower would be bloated--no matter what fonts or rendering capabilities it has. It's certainly possible to achieve this performance with a Unicode-capable, locale-aware text editor--the fact that nobody seems to have managed to do it yet doesn't mean that all known attempts so far haven't been bloated monsters. To the people who are creating these monsters: don't deny this. Your code, or some code you have chosen to depend on, *is* bloated. Please, keep trying until you get it right. It *is* possible.

OTOH, bloat is often tolerable, although still nothing to be proud of. I have a gigabyte of RAM in this laptop because it's easier and cheaper than trying to make a bunch of huge, multi-modular, multi-layered applications smaller.