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big RAM / 64-bit / etc. (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 02.04.2009, 21:19

> In my case, the biggest limit is writing to disk. I have to rate limit the
> amount of that that goes to disk, since in an ordinary system, the
> HD/Windows can't store it. (100MByte/s is the theoretical max, but you
> can't keep that up sustained). Some customers that really wanted all
> images bought storage arrays. That helped.
SSDs are too expensive but supposedly very quiet, low power, and fast (except for sequential reads?). Do you have any yet? You seem to keep abreast of that kind of stuff. (I may have asked you this already in another thread, but I forget honestly. But it sure sounds familiar.)

> The number of times that I watch fullscreen video on my computer monitor
> is a couple of times a year, while I work behind it every day.

I do agree that DVD playback is mostly a useless gimmick (esp. for low-power laptops). Even moreso Blu-Ray. And not much other reason for widescreen that I can think of (for "normal" users like myself).

> > 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!).
>
> Well, that limit is not hard, and shifts with time. There have been people
> making the same argument for 4kb, 64kb, 640kb, 16MB, 64MB, 512MB etc.
I don't think anybody ever said 4k was enough for anything! ;-)

As for the other numbers, blame seems to lie with either Intel or MS. (I actually read today, although highly doubt, that it was IBM's fault for 640k although MS had to push hard else IBM wanted 512k !!)

> I'd put the number on 2GB. Unless you use Vista, then go to the next
> switch.
I'm on Vista with 1 GB, which seems to work fine, but I'm used to low RAM DOS software, plus my (integrated / shared) video card sucks (and I disabled desktop composition), so I guess the latter doesn't waste much RAM (thankfully).

> Without VMs or specially memory hungry programs, I have enough with 2GB.
> 1GB is simply to little if you use GNU tools, since I saw GNU LD use 1.6GB
> to use a 6MB app. It is quite inefficient.
I guess you mean building something big like FPC. Obviously for my wimpy attempts at using GCC/DJGPP, it's never gotten that high (mostly because the OS won't allow it, heh). I still say you should try building the "Gold" (ELF) linker sometime or get one of the other FPC devs to send it to you (or tell you how it works for them, etc).

> > GBs indefinitely while code
> > won't usually surpass a few MB, if even).
>
> My main app where I spend every working hour on, is +/- 1.5-2MB. (made
> with Delphi 2006)
>
> The app where I spend every free hour on (FPC) is about 2MB. (the main
> compiler binary. It is significantly bigger under 64-bit though)
I still feel AMD64 is still a toy for (almost all) people. I'm not saying it isn't useful in the right hands, but it will take time.

P.S. Screwing around with CDlinux CE 0.9.2 (live CD) right now, doesn't seem any faster (or slower) with DOSEMU (not included by default). And of course DOSBox is still (fairly) dog slow and WINE seems to only somewhat work for DOS stuff (no surprise there). Heck, they even had to roll back the included WINE version due to instabilities. But it all overall seems to work nicely for the very basics. BTW, still haven't heard if you were able to build DOSEMU for FreeBSD yet (no pressure). ;-)

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