I dont agree the you should judge by these criteria.
- program size: Who cares? A somewhat decent laptop has 500GB+ SSD storage, I dont care if my editor is 5MB or 50.
- virtual efficiency (RAM usage, and again disk space??): Again who cares if it uses 5MB or 500 RAM? Dev machines have at least 8GB
I care a lot more about stuff like typing lag or autocomplete support.
I've noticed an increase in obnoxious disclaimers like "there are exceptions of course" and "it's just my opinion of course" as people get tired of responding to pointless responses that point those statements out.
That's just my opinion though. There are certainly exceptions. Feel free to disagree!
If only we had the ability to (literally) check boxes to include these disclaimers as flair on our comments. Then they might add disclaimer packs for the most controversial topics so that folks don't have to click too many boxes.
Obviously, there might be exceptions. Some folks might not want this feature. Others may. Who knows? Certainly not me.
What I find kills my machine is trying to run Chrome and Firefox concurrently. Particularly if I still have IntelliJ open.
Just sitting there, with nothing else open, the machine was completely unusable.
I cannot recall anything else I have done with the machine in it's lifetime that's been a real problem.
This includes running firefox and chromium concurrently, plus a couple virtual machines .
But for me it's the Flash plugin container for Firefox that really does the damage when it comes to concurrency. A few Firefox tabs open running YouTube (or another video streaming service) and my fan already starts spinning up louder than a revving motorbike. If I have much more open aside Firefox then the system will just lock up without warning. I suspect Flash is thrashing both CPU and RAM though but it's consistent enough behaviour that I tend to avoid it rather than investing time debugging and fixing (though since it is Flash that kills it, I suspect any such "fix" would just be altering the behaviour of the softwares end user (ie me) anyway).
Come back when you have 150 tabs open. Anyways, somewhere around 200 across 4 windows is where i start seeing about 10GB ram used, with os and other apps.
RAM never seems to be much of an issue unless im abusing things; its cpu/disk that kills me, particularly when some background process goes out of control.
Honestly; having more than a dozen tabs open doesn't make you a hero. It just makes your life a little less convenient.
My solution was the OneTab extension for Chrome. It gives you a button to click to close all tabs (with some ways of marking exceptions), and adds them to a page, so you won't lose them. It groups it by date, from newest to oldest. It makes it easy to come back to the things I left in tabs "in case", while keeping the tab count down.
In effect I find I come back to quite few of them, but knowing I can makes it a lot easier mentally to press that button.
(And now I'm off to do just that before doing some work)
CPU is rarely an issue for me, but disks are a constant source of annoyance.
The turning point for me was when I got a new PC at home that has an SSD. I used to think people exaggerated the benefits of SSDs, or that they were just very impatient. ... Now I am spoiled.
Add in a time machine backup at the same time as a slack video call and it's game over.
That's one reason to care about program size, though less so about the basic binary as about how many extra dependencies it has, and certainly what else it does during initialization matters (e.g. many Emacs configs does DNS requests synchronously in the critical path on startup, and end up hanging until timeouts trigger if your network is down... Fun times)
RAM usage I agree matters less. I can't remember the last time Emacs warned me I was about to open a large file. My own editor is so RAM inefficient it'd bring my laptop to its knees in no-time if I were to open a huge file. I'm happy to fall back on another editor i I for some reason ever need that. Though with many application RAM usage is large for all the wrong reasons (my editor would be in that category for other people; for me it's the right reason: it keeps it tiny and fast for me to hack on for the time being - but I don't inflict it on other people (yet)).
But it's still useful to evaluate on these criteria, as they may matter more for others.