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Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

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tux3·

>Lightweight: Proton is a single binary (<500MB)

Okay, uhm, does this mean the 500 MB is the memory consumption footprint?

No way someone is shipping a giant 500 MB binary hunk, and the selling point is that it's lightweight?

But 500MB of RAM for a DB also seems tiny. That can't be right..

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500MB is the binary size, when you download proton from the GitHub release page. Also available as a docker image. The memory consumption can be 200MB or a few GB, depending on the workload. Comparing to setup Flink/ksqlDB with JVM, Proton is much more lightweight to get started.

From the releases page it looks like the binaries are indeed around 500MB (some platforms actually exceeding that); granted, I am not that familiar with DBs, but calling a 500 MB binary “lightweight” is a little stretch…

1. binary and memory consumption are two different concepts 2. if you compared the size of docker image of Flink and Proton, you will get a better understanding here, flink docker image is 500M after compression and proton is 170M. compare to Flink it is much more lightweighted.

I’m afraid I don’t understand your point: I am not trying to compare Flink to Proton’s docker image sizes; nor do I see how it is relevant. In this case, they are clearly talking about the size of the binary as in “executable of the software you can download”. Both the OP and myself are surprised that a 500MB binary is considered “lightweight”, probably because -even in 2024- “lightweight” should probably still be around the tens of MBs at most.

500MB for such a complete product is tiny! The largest CDN in the world ships 10GB+ binaries. 1G is common for large code bases if you link things statically. The bloat tends to come from transitive dependencies, most direct code is small in size

I was thinking proton as far as particles go isn't lightweight. Neither is Electron web app packaging.

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