Is it reasonable for modern applications to consume large amounts of memory?

Post date

24 Jul 2011

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Question

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Applications like Microsoft Outlook and the Eclipse IDE consume RAM, as much as 200MB. Is it OK for a modern application to consume that much memory, given that few years back we had only 256MB of RAM? Also, why this is happening? Are we taking the resources for granted?

Answer

Answer Source

Yes, it is perfectly normal. Also something big was changed since 256MB were normal... and do not forget that before that 640Kb were supposed to be enough for everybody!

Now most software solutions are build with a garbage collector: C#, Java, Ruby, Python... everybody love them because certainly development can be faster, however there is one glitch.

The same program can be memory leak free with either manual or automatic memory deallocation. However in the second case it is likely for the memory consumption to grow. Why? In the first case memory is deallocated and kept clean immediately after something becomes useless (garbage). However it takes time and computing power to detect that automatically, hence most collectors (except for reference counting) wait for garbage to accumulate in order to make worth the cost of the exploration. The more you wait the more garbage you can sweep with the cost of one blow, but more memory is needed to accumulate that garbage. If you try to force the collector constantly, your program would spend more time exploring memory than working on your problems.

You can be completely sure than as long as programmers get more resources, they will sacrifice them using heavier tools in exchange for more freedom, abstraction and faster development.

The Digital Lumberjack

Hacking Code When Life Goes Digital