Is it me or does Hardy run like a pig?

[Emanoil Kotsev]

Knapp wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Michael Hirsch <mdhirsch at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Mike Shaw <mdshaw89 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi Everyone,
>>>
>>> Just wanted to see what other people's experience with Hardy after
>>> upgrading from Gutsy?  I had been running Gutsy on my T41 for quite a
>>> while and although the performance was not as good as when I was
>>> running Gentoo it was okay.  But I noticed a huge difference after
>>> upgrading to Hardy - and it wasn't a positive.  Firefox especially
>>> seems to have gone down hill.
>>
>> I would agree.  I think that each release has used more memory.  After
>> the hardy upgrade my wife's system is running out of memory.  I'm
>> ashamed that Linux can't run well in .5 Gig.  She doesn't do much, but
>> with firefox, kmail, and openoffice running, she's out of RAM.  I
>> figure with another stick or two it should be fine again.
>>
>> Michael
> 
> You blame Linux but if you look at what you just said, a large part of
> it is because the software you are using is dealing with MS stuff. If
> the web were always standards compliant and file formats did not have
> windows formats to deal with and all the drivers were open source you
> would see a much smaller memory footprint. As it is you can still run
> Damn Small Linux just fine with the memory on your wife's computer.
> Try booting it to ram, you will be shocked at the speed!! Thing is you
> most likely want all the bells and whistles. I would bet that just
> compiling your own Kernel would cut your memory usage way down with
> the removal of unused drivers. Of course I could be off here because
> the newer kernels only load what is needed. I have not played with
> this side of it in many years. Software always grows to use available
> space and speed and that is based on the nice computers a lot of the
> devs have.
> 
> There is also a huge shift in how people code. When I wrote code for a
> C64 we would spend a week going over the machine code to remove a few
> bytes. Now when I code I go over it and make the code longer so that
> it is clearer for debugging and maintenance. I also rarely worry about
> making my code faster or smaller. Why would I waste the time? I have a
> HUGE hd and LOTS of ram and my CPU is a x2 64 bit monster. Then there
> are all the new languages. They make coding faster and less buggy but
> they don't make it more efficient or smaller. A lot of code is now
> done in Python, an interpreted language. It used to be all done in
> assemble or C and compiled.

Thanks for mentioining this. I think it's really the problem and the real
problem is the mentality behind ... as you said 'I don't care because my
machine .... '

Each and every programmer should care about code optimization.

I think younger programmers who did almost never code in C (they are usually
using modern scripting language like python) tend to not think too much
about what they are actually doing at low level

as a result all of us suffer

very very sad