I'm disillusioned (was Re: [ILUG] Netscape (AAAARRRRGGHHH!))

[jplooney at compapp.dcu.ie]

On Tue, Aug 10, 1999 at 06:16:57PM +0100, William Murphy mentioned:
> The box that I was using up to a few years ago was a mac, and it could
> nearly fit all the system software into a meg when the more superfluous
> extensions were turned off. Obviously it's too much to expect that
> today's operating systems use that little memory, but given that linux is
> said to be a fairly efficient operating system, over a meg for a shell
> seems pretty ridiculous, and I can't help but be somewhat disillusioned
> about the efficiency of linux.

 Bash has a lot of stuff you don't need in there. It's a complete
programming interpreter as well as a shell, do remember. Linux makes sure
that when you start a second bash shell, you don't use that much extra RAM
- unlike Macs.

 I have to agree that some of the apps I use these days require a
ridiculous quantity of memory - Netscape, Enlightenment with a very fancy
theme, a few transparent Eterms will leave someone with little free from
100MB of RAM. However, an awful lot of stuff is swapped out - when apps
leak memory or don't use it, it's swapped to disk, so it doesn't matter. It
doesn't excuse the fact, but it's something that's stopped bothering me.

 I remember getting the xv binary for AmigaDOS - and being shocked at it
being 800k - my machine had only 6MB at the time, so it was a performance
hit, as I had to turn on swapping to use it...you load a 50k picture, and
it'll use 2MB with XV - I didn't know why...

Kate

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