It amazes me how bad some software can be. I’ve seen all sorts of applications, utilities, drivers and other doodads and bits and bobs that can be installed. Some are very simple and slick, like uTorrent. It’s a single .EXE, it has no installer, and it just works from running it. It barely has much of a RAM footprint whilst running also, less than 10mb in my experience.
Others are comprehensive, but worth the space, such as Microsoft Office 2003. It takes a fairly reasonable slice of space and does what it needs to do. Most of Office is shared core components. Adding or removing a single app (say Excel) will only be about 10mb, so you may as well just install the lot and have done. Office is a very capable suite of applications though and has a comprehensive set of features, so is worthy of the space it uses. Each Office application uses a fair slice of RAM whilst running.
Once upon a time, applications were written to fit within very strict confines. Processor speed usually wasn’t a major factor, but memory certainly was. Early 8-bit computers had tiny amounts of ram, usually 64kb or 128kb. A fairly capable word processor could fit into that footprint, because the programmer knew the limitations, and made his application fit. With the onset of the 16-bit computer, larger amounts of memory were available, sometimes a whole megabyte! In some cases, such as the Apple Mac, or the Commodore Amiga, this could be used for graphics. Not many extra features were added, but the processes by which you could work with the application were better – WYSIWYG or point-and-click GUIs needed more memory and disk space to perform well, but programmers still knew the limitations. Even then, sometimes the user had to find memory for themselves. Many Amiga games would only run from their own boot disks – running Workbench in the background used too much RAM. Similarly the PC only had 640k base memory, which most often a game or application would use most of, and that was without any CD-ROM drivers or sound drivers loaded.
Now were into a world of PCs with gigbytes of RAM. A realistic spec these days is a whole gigabyte of RAM. The Operating System (OS), say Windows XP in this case, could be sitting in approximately 200mb of that. Other applications will be sitting atop that – background bits and bobs. Some, like I mentioned earlier will be using just what they need. Others will be hanging onto whatever comes their way.
I noticed from looking at my system today that some apps are using silly amounts of RAM. I run Sophos Antivirus, and it’s core service SavService.exe is using 38mb of RAM. Quite for what, I don’t know. Some other apps I can understand why they use so much. iTunes is sitting in 33mb, which I think is reasonable; my library exported is a rather large XML file, so that, along with a lot of other meta data will be sitting in RAM, plus the GUI, graphics, and other bits to make it run.
Until recently, I was running the Nokia suite of applications for my phone. I only used it to pull the odd file off the phone now and then. I noticed that it started a handful of applications which sat resident in memory doing not a lot really. They added greatly to my boot time, and really didn’t do a great deal.
It appears that some big businesses are putting speed of producing apps, and how quickly they can add features ahead of the performance, reliability and resource requirements of the application. Some companies seem to forget that not everybody has a current spec PC. There’s a lot of people out there running £199 Dell special or Tesco computers, which really aren’t great specs. They choke under pressure, and seem to be a new trend. I have nothing major against these – if it opens up computers to more people than it’s a great thing, but what does worry me is the lack of understanding some project managers and companies have for good performance. I wouldn’t blame programmers directly as most are highly talented, but they are pushed so hard, they are churning out stuff they just don’t check, or apply much thought to. Here’s hoping it changes, but I somehow doubt it will.