[paulrpotts]

Ah, thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.

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...

[trurl]

Oh, I definitely recognize the absurdity of the amounts of memory modern software consumes. Twenty years ago I used Linux with 256MB RAM and had pretty much the same sorts of applications running.