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by trurl
3654 days ago
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I am building a next generation database product. With debugging symbols enabled, the running database can easily take up 8GB in some of our unit tests. Then there is a web services layer written in Java above that. And then there is my IDE. And a web browser that leaks abysmally on Google Apps. And a bloated chat application for communicating with all my remote colleagues. At that point the OS starts spending a lot of time trying to compress pages. I have also experimented with doing building and testing on a remote server, but the overhead of having to synchronize local changes to the remote server, rebuild, etc. tends to overwhelm the cost of debugging and iterating on individual tests. |
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For what I do, which these days is mostly embedded programming, I've gotten used to the fact that even a wimpy laptop's CPU and RAM far outstrip what I had on my desktop a few years ago. I was just looking at some e-mails I sent in 1993 where I was talking about building a compressed trie structure for a database to go on CD-ROM, on a Pentium machine, and how it kept running overnight and crashing. These days it could easily fit in RAM without hitting VM and I'm not sure it would even make the fans speed up. (Hmmm, I think I might have the old data set and source; I should give it a try!)
Once in a while I have to do something horrific, like build an embedded Linux kernel with customizations on a VM... and that is punishing, so I do try to run that on a desktop box with some Xeons...