Time for one of my rants before I pick things up again.
I've previously had a bit of an attack on Firefox 3, but now I'm going to discuss a few related points in a more general manner. I remember back in the old days of the mid to late 90s (and even earlier), when resources were limited and software had to play nice. It certainly wasn't universal, but back then it seems as though most programs were somewhat more careful about how they consumed resources. A PC with 32 MB of RAM could only be so useful, and if there were a veritable metric fuckload of background tasks and agents running it would very quickly be brought to it's knees.
Sometimes I yearn for those days back. I have a reasonably beefy PC at work which is completely unusable for 10 minutes after I switch it on, owing to all of the rubbish that needs to load and do it's thing before it even lets me click on the Start button. I have a Java-based development toolkit that requires 2 GB RAM, and I'm not even certain that I'm getting any worthwhile extra functionality for the investment. FF3 has gone to virtually everything running off of interpreted scripts, meaning that even on a reasonably modern dual-core machine it can take whole minutes to load.
This is all time wasted before I can do anything, and it's my time. I remember when going to the magic 64 MB mark would make everything almost instantaneous. I'm fairly deeply suspicious that a lot of development houses have moved to a line of thinking that says "resources are more abundant now, garbage collected platforms mean that we can be sloppy, so let's be really really REALLY sloppy". End result is that things are now far worse than they ever were back then.
Another specific case. If you have a Windows PC with Avast 4 AV on it, try checking how much memory is used in the Performance tab in Task Manager. Now stop all Avast services and check again. Yup, Avast - a free AV that is applauded for being "lightweight" - uses the best part of 100 MB. I don't care if most of that is swapped out and likely never used, that's not the point. The point is that on an old 32 MB machine, you were unlikely to have 100 MB including the swapfile. Why does it need to use so much? What worthwhile extra functionality does it give me for those 100 MB that it couldn't have given me before? Or is it just a case that the developers are sloppy about their memory management?
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
I'm back - let's all make bad software!
Posted by
mhquake
at
11:23 AM
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