Absurd memory footprint

[TransformX]

Hi,

[rant]

I have a PC with 8GB ram, this should be enough to run just about anything and everything. Reality thinks otherwise, especially when a DBA is playing with a virtual machine I was running. Never mind.
Anyway, I was forced to kill some applications to keep my RAM clean and then I noticed...
Skype takes 88.6MB Firefox can take around half a gig, Thunderbird ~200MB. WTF!?
Are you telling me Skype and Thunderbird have more lines of code than Windows 95?
I remember running Windows 95 + applications with 32MB ram. Is this some kind of a sick joke? Are developers these days that lazy or simply bad?

[/rant]

[Umfriend]

Although I recognise the frustration, Firefox is *only* about 45MB in total, not sure but a lot of it won;t even be code or regularly loaded in memory. I am guessing it's the content that takes a lot of memory.

[Jammrock]

Browsers do a lot of caching into RAM instead of the HDD these days to improve responsiveness. All your graphics, videos, etc., all sitting in RAM. I've had Chrome and Opera up to 2+ GB on heavy multi-tab surfing.

Windows 95 was designed in the day with 32MB RAM cost several hundred dollars, and your average computer was $2k. It put only in memory what it absolutely needed and was not very graphically intense. Modern applications are more RAM happy, as RAM is the best place to keep your data so your app is responsive. And since graphics/video take up HUGE amounts of space, browsers can eat huge amounts of memory.

This is one of the reasons why Win8 went down in base memory footprint over Win7 and Vista. Less fancy graphics, and all the memory used for that resides on the video card, or IGP RAM space. This is also why a lot of Linux users like running out of shell or minimalistic GUI's.

[Brian Ellis]

I'm old enough to go back farther. In the days of PC-DOS, IIRC, the first PCs had 320 kby of RAM or you could get the high-performance version with 640 kby, You have 8 Gby, so you have 25,000 times as much memory as the first PCs. Then along came MS-DOS (almost the same as PC-DOS) and PC clones which more or less standardised for years on 1,024 kby. At the time Bill Gates announced that 640 kby was enough for anyone!

However, wait for it, I did a lot of scientific work on the HP-85 computer, which had 16 kby of memory

Specifications for Hewlett Packard 85

Manufacturer: Hewlett Packard, Calculator Products Division
Model Number: 85
Serial Number:
IntroductioN: December, 1979
Date of Manufacture: 1980
Manufactured In: USA
Original Price: $3250 (base)
Weight: 21 Pounds
Size: 16" Wide, 18" Deep, 6" High
Power Requirement: 40 Watts, 115VAC
Display Technology: 5" Diagonal CRT, 16 lines by 32 characters
48 Line scroll buffer
Logic Technology: LSI Microprocessor, Single Board
16K bytes dynamic RAM Program/Working Storage
Digits of Capacity: 12 Significant Digits
Decimal Modes: Floating, Scientific Notation
Arithmetic Logic: Full Algebraic w/Precendence, Conversational
Math Functions: Four Function, Raise to power, Square Root,
Logarithms, Trigonometry, User definable functions,
Random Number Generation. Expandable with ROM packs.
Constant: N/A
Memories: N/A. Float, Integer, Short Numeric Variables
String Variables
Numeric Arrays and Matrices
Programmable: Yes, Fully-featured BASIC programming language
Volatile RAM Program/Storage Register Memory
Peripherals: Built-in 32-column Thermal Printer
Filesystem-oriented magnetic tape drive
Optional Printers, Plotters, mass-storage, modem,
Serial and Parallel interfaces, speech synthesizer

Go back to ENIAC. It had zero RAM for holding software, it was hard wired. Data could be stored in accumulators, 200 in all, equivalent to 1600 bytes if converted to today's RAM. You have 5 million times more. Yet ENIAC did complex ballistic calculations.

It is true you don't need massive amounts of memory. Windows and its applications are pure and simple bloatware that exploits cheaply available memory and CPU speeds to make your screen pretty and interactive. In the 1970s, I used a dedicated word processor that had CP/M as its O/S. It was able to do 95% of what Word 2010 could do. With its 128 kby of RAM, I could type into it just as fast than I can today (actually faster then). Its printer was daisy-wheel so was slower than my laser of today, roughly 30 sec per A4 page. Its screen was tiny, 3 lines of LED characters. To change font needed a few seconds of pause, to change the daisy-wheel. It was noisy when printing at 30 chars/sec. But it got the job done without the bells and whistles of Windows and bloatware.

I miss the convenience of MS-DOS!

[Umfriend]

The first PC I worked with (which was not even a PC-AT IIRC) had 64Kb of RAM. Owners of the C-64 (like me) used to laugh at the PCs but they did have two things going for them: the keyboard and the power "CLUNCK" switch.

[TransformX]

My first PC was a 8086 (or 8088, not 100% certain) with 256KB and later 640KB. Next stop was in the army on a MicroVAX (obviously it wasn't mine) and then a Pentium 150Mhz with 32MB and Win95.
I kept DOS and similar 'console' OS out of the debate because I understand how GUI added considerable weight on the memory footprint. I understand how HTML (+flash, js etc) rendering becomes a huge memory hog, but I find absolutely no excuse for Skype to take 88MB, Thunderbird at 200MB, and.. Let me take a look at my gnome-system-monitor:

Guess what, gnome system monitor takes 40MB. Oh really? In which way exactly is a monitoring device more complex that a whole graphics OS including drivers and such? gnome-terminal at nearly 60MB. Whaaaaat? A console, a text device at 60? Isn't that more or less a vt320 with extra windows? Did a vt320 have that much to it?
Maybe I'm old school, maybe I know nothing about programming, but I honestly have an extremely hard time understanding this. 3 tabs with a maximum of 4096 lines of text. Let's go berserk here, 12,000 lines at an arbitrary width of 120 characters. Now unless I'm completely wrong here, I'll assume 24bit per character to cover just about anything you can throw at me including 4 bit color.
That would give... 12k lines x 120 characters x 3 bytes per character / 1 million = 4.32MB
All the history of all three tabs make less than 5MB. WHY IS IT TAKING 63.5MB ???

[Umfriend]

Maybe I'm old school

LOL, I was pleased to see SQL Server 2008 introducing the DATE datatype as it required 3 bytes instead of the 8(!) bytes required by DATETIME.

[Jammrock]

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."
— Wirth’s law