Comments on: The power of a 500 MHz Pentium III system with 128 MB of RAM.

By: adam

adam — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:16:30 +0000

AVG Free

http://free.grisoft.com

By: Chui Tey

Chui Tey — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 05:58:14 +0000

Actually McAfee AV chews up about 300 Mb on my machine. Anyone can recommend better alternatives?

By: Jivlain

Jivlain — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 01:39:05 +0000

Software expands to fill the hardware that contains it. If everyone’s got shiny 3GHz dual-core processors, 2Gb of memory and a 300Gb hard drive it’s only natural that we’ll all run software that, for no good reason, actually needs all that.

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 23:55:09 +0000

With just Xorg, emacs, and opera the memory is pretty much consumed. For emacs I don’t know that memory consumption was much of a design criteria however I see on Ubuntu its using about 10mb-13mb, which isn’t that bad.

By: MemoryWhore

MemoryWhore — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 17:16:16 +0000

And yes, I too am nostalgic for the days of I hacked QBASIC on a 486. But I’d rather retire from the IT world than go back to that. I’m gleefully looking forward to when I have terabytes of memory at my disposal.

By: MemoryWhore

MemoryWhore — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 16:54:10 +0000

Well, my original comment was vaporized when your little
blog shat out some sort of PHP/DB connectivity error. For
some reason I’m rewriting the comment:

If you’re working with images, it is perfectly imaginable
and common to use several hundred MB of memory. A few medium
(or even one large image) combined with undo histories can
easily eat up several hundred or even well over a gig of
memory. When I set my image editor to only use 128 MB, I am
quite annoyed by the lack of undo history, and I only edit
relatively small images at a maximum of 3kx2k pixels one at
a time.

There are many other “legitimate” uses of gross amounts of
memory. However, I do admit that these uses for the common
PC user to be few and far between.

On the other hand, I will argue the typical “illegitimate”
uses of memory are in fact quite legitimate when you take in
to account the extreme difficulty it would take to optimize
the memory footprint of modern software as much as is
practically possible. Given how cheap memory is, the market
for such software is very small. This is rather fortunate in
my opinion, because although I find an occasional
optimization hack to be challenging and fun, I would find it
very tiresome and tedious to do such optimizations again and
again out of necessity.

Do I think it’s worth having an extra 60 MB of RAM (at about
$1 / 16 MB) for all of Firefox’s bloated features (including
for example quicker backwards navigation)? Absolutely.

By: RobM

RobM — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 11:08:39 +0000

I presume you’ve all seen this?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

I realise he’s the spawn of the devil because he once took Microsoft’s shilling, but I still think he makes a good point.

By: Dynamic

Dynamic — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 09:52:15 +0000

That would be oh so nice, static, if XP were equivalent to Ubuntu.

XP is a joke.

By: Bitter Old Man

Bitter Old Man — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 04:38:42 +0000

1 Meg of RAM! And we liked it! We LOVED it!

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 04:08:59 +0000

First, the memory available on systems a decade or more old has no bearing on the modern concept of “minimal”. I can’t recall the last time I was on a system with less than 512, and even that is rare.

However, as an embedded developer, we don’t use Linux on our embedded systems specifically because Linux hogs way too much memory for a resource-limited, real-time environment like a network switch. So, at least for us embedded folks, there still are places today where you can find memory-limited systems where the original poster’s argument is in fact laughable.