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CHM reader in DOS (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 02.04.2009, 00:16

> > > (I should have mentioned that it does this too in 64-bit mode, where
> it
> > > can allocate +/- 6GB, so it is not memory fragmentation or the like)
> >
> > Do you routinely use that much RAM (besides for maybe extra caching)??
> > :-|
>
> Not currently. I had clusters of memory databases in a previous job though
> (several machines, 3GB each, and then a machine that would combine the
> subqueries from the data machines). At that time 64-bit was too difficult
> though, and big DIMMs were too expensive. Nowadays you would simply chuck
> 16GB in a Eur 499 64-bit machine and be done with it.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to use tons and tons of memory, just that most (and I do mean most) people really really don't need to use ridiculous amounts. Sure, I could run several OSes at once in separate VMs and use 16 GB (if I had that much), but I don't really need (or want) to do that.

> Currently my apps are typically 400-700MBish Some are bigger, but 1100MB
> working size is about max. If it is bigger, it is due to leaks. But some
> of them have 100MByte/s (2 GBit lines, though not entirely full) of image
> throughput, the queues of memory buffers for the cameras, and the
> image-queue that must be written to disk alone eat a lot.
A lot of RAM usage is just caching for extra speed. As processors get faster, you'd think that would go down, but for some reason, every x86 cpu has "gotchas" where "you can't do this and this, such and such must be aligned, and blah blah is slow unless you pair it with this and that". (It must be super hard to design an easy-to-program-for processor that is also fast.)

> > Don't forget that we used to have HDs smaller than that!!!
>
> So? I have had 10MB HDs, but that never stopped me from using more than
> 10MB of ram either.
>
> In one of my apps I have pictures of 4096x7000x8bpp which are 28MB each.

I almost expect you to say, "Widescreen monitors are cheap, and with HD becoming common as well as Blu-Ray, it makes no sense to scale down below 1024x768. Even 8bpp is a waste of the spectral bandwidth. This is not 1988 anymore."

> I couldn't even fit that on such HD. (which actually wasn't my first. My
> first was 40MB, but later I got 10MB discs in a second machine. It was
> cheap because it was MFM and nobody wanted it anymore)
Obviously you shouldn't stick to 10 MB of RAM. The whole point is that > 1 GB is enough to fit an entire OS in (and a semi-modern one, too!). So, in short, don't forget what a luxury it is and how much can fit in it. When you start believing the hype that "10 GB of RAM is nothing", then you really are doing something wrong (note that I'm mainly talking about code size, not data, since data can expand through GBs indefinitely while code won't usually surpass a few MB, if even).

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