This is a 6 month old thread, but today I came across an even older (15 year old, actually) book which is amusingly relevant to this thread - a thread which discussed the preposterous memory use of GNOME applications and applets.
On Tue, Jan 16, 2007, Oded Arbel wrote about "Why are GNOME applications (and applets) take so much [EMAIL PROTECTED] memory ?": > And can something be done about it ?? >.... > 3310 odeda 16 0 181M 32696 4344 S 0.0 0.9 > 5:55.44 /usr/libexec/netspeed_applet2 --oaf-activate-iid= > > The network monitoring applet - shows a small box with the amount of > bytes being passed through the interface at the moment. It also graphs > network history for the last 5 minutes or so - still it uses 180MB, > almost 20% of my total dynamic memory. I cringe to think about what > people with 512MB memory do. The 15-year old book "The UNIX Haters Handbook" (now of print, but available freely online http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf) has a chapter on what it calls "The X-Windows Disaster". Among other "compliments" to X, it says that "X Windows is to memory as Ronald Raegan was to money". You thought that 32 MB of memory for a tiny applet was too much, but when that book was written, people were annoyed by much less: "... Sun's Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn't have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 "xclock" utility consumes 656K to run. And X's memory usage is increasing". (by the way, their count of 22 Commodore 64s is based on the incorrect assumption that the C64 had 64 K of usable RAM. In fact, of the addressable 64K, only 38 K were available to ordinary programs, so as many as 37 C64s are needed for olclock :-)) I don't share these author's dislike for the X Window System - in fact I think it is a fantastic invention that today is not understood enough and not used or developed to its full potential. I especially disagree with their dislike of the ICCCM ("a technological disaster, a toxic waste dump of broken protocols"). But I agree that software bloat is a terrible thing. Those who didn't cry out about the 1.4 MB clock applet of 1993, got a 32 MB clock applet in 2007... So down with software bloat! -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Jun 4 2007, 18 Sivan 5767 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into http://nadav.harel.org.il |your signature to help me spread! ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
