RAM usage bonanza

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webfork
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RAM usage bonanza

#1 Post by webfork »

It's not the first time this has come up and inclusion of this is somewhat inspired by TP109's excellent work, where someone notes how many programs RAM usage is really getting out of hand.

TP109
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Re: RAM usage bonanza

#2 Post by TP109 »

Interesting article. Some relevant excerpts:
"Using Atom or Code I experience frequent freezes for several minutes when just typing a single character."

"Code requires a whopping 349 megabytes in order to open a 60 byte file. Atom comes in at 256 megabytes. Where Vim “only” needs 5 megabytes, which is still kind of high, but representative of an average configuration."

"What about larger files? Opening a 6 megabyte XML file in Vim consumes around 12 megabytes. Nano is pretty much neck-and-neck with Vim. Code needs 392 megabytes, and Atom needs a whopping 845 megabytes."

"What about the amount of time necessary to open that same XML file, then move your cursor to the end of it? This tells a similar story. Atom and Code take nearly 20 seconds. Vim takes around 4 seconds. Sublime is surprisingly fast here taking only a mere second."
I didn't officially test those text editors and similar ones since most of them won't run on XP. For those that could, I unofficially tested some of them and they were extremely slow and impractical. It's amazing that resource usage has to reach these levels before it's noticed. As mentioned before, designs are often driven by user appeal to add more features, pizazz and eye candy, without any consideration to performance, even to the point where some programs can become a burden rather than a useful tool.

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