Linux fat/bloated

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 10:32:04PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 09:30:11AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote
> 
> > Actually I think you are entirely wrong.  Linux is so efficient at the
> > use of memory for shared objects that it only loads one copy no matter
> > how many programs and users are using it.
> 
>   Only one copy of perl, only one copy of python, only one copy of PHP,
> only one copy of QT, only one copy of GTK, only one copy of Java, only
> one copy of Ruby... etc, etc.  *THAT IS THE PROBLEM*.

Would you like to go back to things like HPUX 9 and applications written
in fortran 77?

HPUX 9 didn't even support shared libraries.  They were all static.  To
deal with running X on this, they linked ALL of the X stuff (window
manager, xterm, cde desktop manager, etc) into a single multiuse binary,
since they did support copy on write.  So xterm was an 8MB binary,
hardlinked to the same binary as the X server and the window manager,
etc.  Good luck as soon as you tried to run any other X application,
which of course also ended up rather huge, and being a new binary would
of course not share one bit with the X stuff already running.  The
fortran 77 application I remember dealing with was unigraphics.  Since
fortran 77 didn't have dynamic memory allocation, they had setup most
structures as arrays of 65536 elements, just in case they ever needed
them.  So a single instance of the application took about 95MB of ram,
no matter what size your drawing was.  I have a pretty good idea what
the 256MB ram those workstations had in them cost at the time (this was
around 1997).

Remember kde and gtk are optional.  Linux does not require them.  No one
makes you use them on your system if you don't want to, and there are
lots of useful programs that don't use them.

You don't need php at all if you don't run a web server with php
scripting (most of my machines don't).  You don't need java (most of my
machines don't have java either), you don't need ruby (whatever uses
that anyhow?).  perl and python I do have lots of things using, and they
are not that big.  You don't need emacs (that should save more space
than most of the scripting languages), and you can run without gtk and
qt installed, as long as you are willing to not use a certain set of
applications.  At least qt is easy to avoid.  firefox is kind of nice to
have around, although there is always opera I guess.

Len Sorensen
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