"Sebastian Späth" wrote:
>
> Yes, it is indeed a controversal statement and I don't agree with it
> (and not only because my personal computer falls into that 233 Mhz
> category :-)).
My computer is 600Mhz with 128Mb, and I *still* agree.
An app should use the amount of memory / resources necessary to do its
job, no more. Of course there will be space/time tradeoffs, but it is
usually possible to design in a way that will perform poorly (but
adequately - ie without thrashing) if the extra space is not present,
but make use of it if it is.
On the other hand, I'm not unhappy with the current situation. It is
clear that the Mozilla developers realize that the current performance
and memory usage is excessive and are working to correct it. I'm glad
that they worried first about functionality, stability and correctness,
and put space- and time-efficiency after these criteria. This message is
only directed to people who would suggest that we abandon all effort to
make the lizard lean and mean and usable for people on older computers.
I would suggest that we should optimize for a machine with >64Mb, but
ensure that we degrade gracefully even down to 32 (heck, 4.x ran fine on
a machine with 16!). I don't think that processor speed is as important
- performance degradation is linear with processor speed and users of
slow computers expect things to be moderately slow, but there is a very
sharp cut-off when the app's working set becomes smaller than the
available RAM. I do think we should make sure that it is possible to run
in a working set appropriate for a 32Mb machine, even if it means
throwing out some performance optimizations in that case.
Now that the Lizard is open source, I can even imagine doing this as a
compilation option, to reduce the overhead caused by making this
conditional.
Stuart.
