[PLUG] Bloat

[Aditya Godbole]

I just got thinking for a moment today about the amount of memory that
our computer systems today use. Of course, if you are a 'computer
scientist' you can safely ignore this and say you have infinite
memory.
Anyway, for the other mortals, I remember I had a P1 with 16 MB RAM
and 32 MB swap space. I could run X, a window manager like afterstep,
a mail program like sylpheed, xchat, xmms, emacs and gcc at the same
time without any issues. The computer would start thrashing sometimes,
but it was few and far between. The point is 48 MB memory was quite
sufficient.
I had a look at my memory usage today and with a very minimal
configuration it goes to 250 MB. Firefox takes 75 MB of resident
memory! Pidgin takes about 30 MB. Konsole takes about 20 MB. Is it
that all the libs have become bloated? Is it the apps themselves? When
exactly did all of us become computer scientists? :)

-aditya