2009/1/11 Putrycz, Erik
On old systems, bloat was causing a few megabytes of extra memory access, now it can be 100-400MB. And it's no 11 cycles, but CPUs wait 100's on cache misses, never mind if there's a page fault and disk access involved.
In my experience, it takes 2 generation of software to get things right.
Someone has experessed the opinion that memory consumption is escalating.
From what I can see Qt4/KDE4 combo, uses a little less memory than the same OS running Qt3/KDE3. Similarly Firefox 3, is using less memory than FF2.
So actually the developers seem to be doing a good job, they're not going the "Bloaty Vista" route, but trying to keep things efficient, because of experience in previous generation of systems. This has paid off in the fastest growing areas, which are the low power consumption, lower peformance machines. The point about memory being relatively slower than it used to be, means cache misses are relatively greater penalties, and that the optimisation work than went into FF3 for example, is very perceptible even on systems with plenty of RAM. RAM size is not, the only thing that determines good peformance, diminishing returns set in, and IMO the general PC press haven't caught up with that yet. Good code is important. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org