On Fri, Dec 29, 2000 at 05:22:40PM +0100, Oskar Sandberg wrote:
>
> What is it with you and the constant underhand insults? I've completely
> stopped taking offense, so you might as well continue now, but it seems
> unnecessary all the same.
>
> If Fred is leaking memory then it is a bug. Most probably mine. It's also
> called a mistake, programmers that unlike you are not quite devine make
> them.
I recognize that this was probably just a little bug, and this really
wasn't meant as a personal attack against you. I was talking about
software in general, not just Freenet. I am sick and tired of bloated
software that expects the newest and best hardware to run on. This
kind of stuff is really more apparent with Winblows than Linux, but it
is still an issue with Linux. I once noticed that most of the
programs I run under Linux, including really little programs, usually
use more than a megabyte of memory space at once. You're probably
thinking that a megabyte of memory space doesn't matter. However, if
you have a whole bunch of processes running at once, those megabytes
add up. But then, a lot of people would say that there is plenty of
swap available. But the problem with using swap is that it is much
slower than having programs purely reside in real memory. And the
speed reductions incurred by swapping are very significant - the loss
in speed due to limiting the sizes of hash tables associated with each
list (nfreenetd (yes, nfreenetd is coming along slowly - I haven't had
much time) uses a general purpose list and hash facility that I wrote
- lists may be associated with hashes to make lookups for items within
a list that uses a hash have near (it is slightly more complex if
there are hash collisions) O(1) complexity) to 64K (for really
important lists such as the primary datastore item list) (this isn't
enforced in software - I just make sure that I set the size of hashes
to a small size (if there are lots of lists using hashes, these surely
add up)). I'm not claiming that I have never made programming
mistakes or have never made programs that required absurd amounts of
memory (I remember that once I made a demo of a little sprite
animation library for the Mac - it used 8 MB of RAM (in normal
operation this demo about 6 32x32 sprites in 256 indexed colors would
be on the screen and there would be 640x480 background in 256 indexed
colors). I'm not claiming that I don't need to do debugging (I always
have to spend lots of time debugging anything nontrivial that I
write). I'm just saying that many programmers these days forget about
memory and such.
--
Travis Bemann
Sendmail is still screwed up on my box.
My email address is really [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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