On Thursday 08 March 2001 18:52, you wrote:
> On Thursday 08 March 2001 05:26, you wrote:
> > Actually, I think its KDE thats bloated and resource hungry.
> > I have an AMD K6 350 with 64 megs of RAM,
> > give it KDE and netscape 6 and it goes so slowly I have
> > to check to make *certain* its not running Windows!
>
> 64MB is tight. However, run Konqueror instead of Netscape and see how much
> free memory you have. Netscape 4 is certainly a massive memory hog.
There is a good point I want to raise here, and that's to put the
requirements into perspective. To trim memory from Konqueror, XFree, and the
rest of the packages is very likely a massive amount of effort, if it's even
doable. At that expense comes the expense of not having new features added
or bugs fixed - after all, a developer can do only thing at a time.
Now let's look at the price of memory these days. In Minnesota, a 64MB PC133
DIMM can be had for under $20. 128MB is only $35. Check out
http://www.nanosys1.com for verification. The system I just bought had a
256MB DIMM in it - and yes, the price of the memory dropped about 25% since I
bought it a month or two ago :-(
Now, do we really want a developer to be spending hours and hours trying to
save a few bytes off the memory fingerprint to save you spending $20 for
another 64MB? A few years ago when 64MB was expensive, the answer would
probably be yes. But I don't believe that should be the case anymore.
I sure I hope I don't sound like MS and encourage bloatware, because I don't
and would like to see small, compact efficient implementations. Sometimes,
however, end users are asking for the impossible. If you want to run in a
small memory footprint like the "good old days", go back to the software of
the "good old days" and scrap the windowing interface and use a shell. You
can't have it both ways.
.../Ed
p.s. I'm old enough to remember programming overlays on RSX-11M to fit
applications into 64K and remember muli-user graphics systems shipping with
512K. I've got memory on my video card now than you can physically fit into
an older VAX I've still got in production at work!
--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
