From: Stefan Matthias Aust Date: 2002-05-08T17:17:21+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Java vs. Native trivia "Sean Russell" schrieb > I've never understood this. AmigaOS was heavily dependant on DLLs -- in > fact, I don't think it was possible to build an app without linking to > DLLs. Yes, I remember the same. > Not only did the apps come up very quickly, but they consumed almost > no memory, since huge parts of the codebase were, well, shared. I remember > that, out of 4MB, just booting AmigaOS would consume about 2.5MB... Well, my Amiga had 512KB RAM, with Kickstart (the OS kernel) and Intuition (the graphical UI) in ROM. The Workbench and most of its DLLs plus the CLI (shell) and its commands fitting on one 800k diskette. I think, the programs were not as complex as today's programs. Even Ruby would have been a really large program on the Amiga. With nearly 2MB too large for my Amiga, btw. > In any case, I'm /mostly/ baffled by the amount of memory and the time that > is required by more modern OSes. Some memory is spend on better features and more comfort but a lot of memory is also consumed because of the way were progam nowadays and how the basic libraries are programmed. > -- but I don't get into the internals of Linux much. Still, it would seem > to me that the basic theory is fairly straightforward: you load system > libraries in a shared, non-writeable space, and everybody just accesses > them from there. The first person who runs KDE gets a big load time, but > beyond that, it's just allocating per-user data spaces. You unload the > library when it isn't used and gets swapped out of memory. The problem here - I benchmarked KDE because of its memory constraints on a multiuser Solaris machine a year ago - is that all libraries need large chunks of private data. And every 500k or 1 MB here and there add up to quite a few MBs per application per user. So while the code segment is shared, that's small compared to the needed private data. bye -- Stefan Matthias Aust // www.3plus4software.de // Inter Deum Et Diabolum Semper Musica Est