[aklug] Re: A developer's take on system resource consumption

Arthur,
I would beg to differ. Crippling developers with older machines, presumably
less memory/less powerful CPU, would be a mistake. As modern IDEs progress
and add features to assist developers, these features often come at a cost
of higher CPU and memory requirements. For instance, I use Xcode 4 for most
of my development even for open source projects due to the awesome, as in
full of awe, debugging and integration capabilities it has due to LLVM (for
example, the analyzer functionality:
http://iphonedevelopertips.com/xcode/static-code-analysis-clang-and-xcode-3-2.html).
 It has a much greater memory foot print than Xcode 3.0 which had a greater
impact than using just bash/vi/gcc. Before anyone shouts foul for comparing
an OS X IDE to Linux development, I routinely use Xcode4 to analyze my code
for linux/freebsd daemons.

I do fully support using older hardware as test servers/workstations for
development so the developers are able to see the impact of performance.

--David M. Syzdek

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Arthur Corliss
<acorliss@nevaeh-linux.org>wrote:

> Guys:
>
> Caught this article on /.:
>
>
> http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2011/06/mozilla-launches-memshrink-eff.html
>
> in which Mozilla is now going to dedicate a team to targetting memory
> utilization. One of the statements in the article struck me as pertinent:
>
> There are plenty of people out there at have 1 GB or less of RAM. As
> I'm writing this post now, Firefox 4.0.1 is consuming 633 MB on my
> machine and that's not abnormal. Simply put, it's just waaay too much
> RAM for a web browser. Then again, if you've got 8 GB of DDR3 RAM,
> you likely aren't all that worried about using 633 MB for Firefox. So
> maybe it's just a question of focus. Is Mozilla still interested in
> the mainstream consumer?
>
> Obviously, I expect a great deal of debate over what a "mainstream
> consumer"
> really constitutes in terms of memory consumption. Even so, it highlights
> a
> problem some of us have been bitching about since the '80s: with all of
> the
> magnitude increases in system resources over the years why is it that all
> of
> our actual gains are only incremental?
>
> Ultimately, our incremental gains are entirely the fault of the developer.
> While some of our ambitions can only legitimately be done on a
> bigger/faster
> machine, the fact that we're targeting more "modern" hardware in general
> allows us to take shortcuts and less aggresively optimize that we'd
> otherwise do.
>
> Ironically, while I have both harped and groused on this subject for as
> long
> as I've been using computers, I've been just as guilty as anyone else.
> Having recently made my primary personal computer a 700MHz toughbook with
> 256MB of RAM that point has been driven home. My missteps as a developer
> has
> consequences. Having a development system with such meager resources
> amplifies any frivolous use of CPU, RAM, or I/O, and it's something I now
> more actively try to counter since I have to live with it. Even minor
> missteps can cumulatively hurt.
>
> All of which brings forth a good question: how much better a computing
> situation would we all be in if *developers* were forced to be at the tail
> end of the upgrade cycle, rather than the forefront? If we, as a matter of
> routine, had lower-spec'd hardware than the majority of the users we have
> to
> support?
>
> I know my developmental process has become slower, but more deliberative.
> I
> actively try to anticipate system resource utilization beforehand. I test
> and benchmark multiple approaches to solving the same problem to see which
> one taxes the system the least. Sometimes it pays to be poor, eh? ;-)
> (Side
> note: I'm not really poor... cheap, yes, but not poor. And I've
> definitely
> been blessed...)
>
> So, let's start a movement to cripple developers with old machines! Who's
> with me? ... Well, I suppose I should have seen that one coming... ;-)
>
> --Arthur Corliss
> Live Free or Die
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Received on Sat Jun 11 14:38:28 2011