[geeks] OSX Server

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Mar 2005, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 
>> > 24MB for a mixer applet?!?  Good god.  That is just fucking beyond absurd.
>>
>> True, true.
>>
>> A lot of it is because the applet system is not accessible from an X
>> interface alone, or some small "applet library", you have to link in
>> just about everything.
> 
> Well, just to be fair how much of that size is actually shared? Linux
> accounts for a process size using the shared memory too (actually I think
> most unixen do).

As I said (or meant to), even accounting for shared libraries, these 
programs are huge.

Also, it doesn't really matter if the code is shared or not.

It is bloody stupid for a program which sends a few bytes of command 
information to a mixer device to need 24MB of code + libraries to do 
that job.

Also, when you have huge shared libraries that every program you run 
needs, it puts excessive pressure on the VM subsystem.

It either can't find opportunities to page them out, or it can't do so 
long enough to avoid performance problems.

  > Still a lot of these frameworks have so much bloat, and are so poorly
> coded that you end up with gargantuan code. But I guess the adagio is
> always true: You get what you pay for.

In this case, it doesn't apply.

True, I didn't pay for Gnome directly.

But I have paid for it indirectly.  Open source development is funded by 
governments and corporations, has been for decades (open source is not a 
90s invention).

The cost of open source is not free, never has been.  Somebody is paying 
for it, somewhere.

The programmers writing this stuff do it because someone is paying them, 
or they are getting paid enough that they can afford to spend time on it.

Open source development, for decades, has been subsidized by 
corporations, or your taxes.

If you could actually calculate your costs for open source, whether you 
use it or not, you might be surprised how much you have paid for it.

> Although this is also pandemic to Windows too, create a small VisualC
> anything and you end up linking with everything plus the sink and kitchen
> brush. 

It is pretty ugly, that's for sure.

> Same for OS-X, even small applets end up with some ridiculous sizes
> (although most of the time, I humour myself by seeing their virtual mem
> request footprint)

I think though, that Apple has done a better job of separating things. 
For example, it seems that the "link everything" problem doesn't exist 
there.  I haven't had a lot of time to sit down and check libraries, but 
what I did look at didn't seem as bad as Gnome to me.

Part of a MacOS X applications memory footprint is how they manage image 
data.

It's funny... it doesn't seem all that long ago I stopped using xterm 
because it was using way too much memory, and I found Motif was the 
biggest UI pig I'd ever seen.

> The price of progress I guess :)

Unnecessary bloat and avoidable bugs isn't progress though.