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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

I can't help to notice that all the apps he's talking about that add to the overall memory load are Microsoft apps.

I'm using an open source editor, gmail, xamp, and some webbased servuces and I'm having no problems with 1GB of memory.

I noticed that as well. I run Ubuntu, which could be part of it (although that's not to say Ubuntu's not a little bloated as well). Just to test this, I opened up every program that I could think of which I use on a regular basis:

  - Firefox, with 20 tabs
  - Skype
  - Pidgin
  - Three terminal windows, running Python, vim, and CherryPy
  - Songbird
  - GIMP with a photo loaded
  - Two OpenOffice Writer files
  - Geany (a text editor) with nine tabs
  - Nautilus
  - Three large PDFs (books) using Evince Document Viewer
  - System Monitor (not much)

And I'm only at 1.2 GB! (No swap, out of 2 GB total.) I rarely have all of these programs open at once, either.

While I agree with his point in general, it might be overall more effective to avoid relying on apps as bloated as Visual Studio. Then, you can save some of the money on computer upgrades and avoid any negatives that might be associated with developing on a high-end computer. (Of course, I'm a moron for suggesting that there might be any.)

I agree with you that using less bloated software could be an option but for some it just isn't an option and they are bound to use (at least some of) the bloated software because of the platform they are developing for or other dependencies...

I think what we can take from the article is that companies bound to use such software have to invest a bit more for their hardware, and to be honest, the costs for the additional RAM probably are pretty negligible compared to the licensing costs for the "bloated software".

Of course 8 GB is a pretty high number but it doesn't come with that high a price anymore.

You're right, of course. But there are a lot of people who use this kind of software that don't actually need to, and who would probably be better off using other options.

Also, I don't think that licensing costs hurt my point; by using free software, they could save on that money as well.

Indeed. On my system (2GB), I use Vim in urxvt with zsh.

From top: .1 + .4 + .2= .7% of my ram. I could add in Postgres or sqlite and Apache (or even a lighter weight webserver) if I really needed it, and still probably not use my swap.

I'm on OS X. 1GB would not work. I have 3 GB. Activity monitor is showing these top 5 rsize values:

Safari 550 MB. Safari leaks memory, and restarting it then reopening all tabs is quite slow.

kernal_task 322 MB

Textmate 300MB (not normal)

WindowServer 136 MB

Mail 106 MB

I think you must be looking at the total memory for the apps (including shared libraries, etc), because I ran OSX with 512MB for five years without much trouble. I typically had mail, opera, and tons of terminals open, and there was still typically around 40MB of free memory. Upgrading my laptop to 2GB did allow me to run safari and webkit and iTunes (now that's a hog) at the same time, which was definitely nicer, but I never really felt crippled by only having 512MB before that.

Are you still running Panther on that machine? If so, try running Leopard on 512mb ram.

It's currently running X.5, whatever cat that is associated with. I did have to disable the background indexing stuff (searchlight?) due to my blazing fast 4200 RPM drive, but it ran pretty well with 512MB. Spaces even worked. Things were better with 2GB, but it was completely usable for what I needed, which was email, a light browser, and terminals galore.

As I said, that's the RSIZE column from activity monitor. Safari is now 532 rsize, 562 rprvt, and 69 rshrd. It's a lot less if you restart it more often and have less windows open.

itunes is not a memory hog by comparison. it's using 62/30/32 in the same order.

Are you running 64-bit? I wonder if the size difference is due to that. I've heard 64-bit processes are bigger, due to larger pointers and longs, but I wouldn't expect things to be so amazingly huge. I certainly couldn't have survived on 512MB if my computer were using memory the way yours is.

Also, have you tried using webkit nightlies? I found that they were much more memory-friendly than safari, especially with flash disabled.

32 bit. i don't have to try webkit nightlies, or restart safari, because i have enough ram. ram saves my time. which was kind of the point of the article :)

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