On 17/01/07, Amos Shapira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 17/01/07, Nadav Har'El <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tue, Jan 16, 2007, Oded Arbel wrote about "Re: Why are GNOME > applications (and applets) take so much [EMAIL PROTECTED] memory ?": > > I usually see a problem after about a week of usage - after a reboot > it > > behaves itself for a few days. I rebooted this morning, and now Evo is > > > down to 400MB. > > With the mad race to get better and better hardware, it seems that > people > forgot how to write efficient software. One of the lost arts is > preventing > memory leaks. Keep an eye for Andy S. Tannenbaum's keynote at LCA this morning on http://lca2007.linux.org.au/Programme#head-6af3ad9cefbbb05127e86c3d2f00c2542a1bb75e (I'm sure the slides/audio/video will show up later). He talks exactly about this - how his PDP-11 with 64kb RAM used to boot in 4 seconds while his top-of-the-line Xeon server takes two minutes to boot, or how a VAX shared among 80 users and with 1 Mb of ram gave good service to all of them. He quoted someone from Microsoft to the effect of "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster" Ah, and another good quote - "Software is gas - it grows to use all of its container". (He then goes on to a different path - explaining why Minix 3's tiny amount of kernel-mode code is important in a world of bloated software).
The video is now available in OGG Theora format at http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/wednesday/Wednesday_0900_Tanenbaum.ogg (from http://lca2007.linux.org.au/Programme). --Amos
