[jacquesm]

512MB is absolute overkill for the application that you built, it is the choice of OS + the tooling used that resulted in that requirement. Not all that long ago 32 MB served a whole bank, and embedded systems used kilobytes of RAM, not megabytes. We've gotten so used to slapping a full unix server into stuff that we hardly even think about it any more and just take that kind of power completely for granted. I'm not saying you made any wrong choices, it's just that most of the embedded stuff that I come across would be just as feasible on a fraction of the CPU (and power) budget than what we typically choose because for instance Lua is such a convenient choice for a platform like that.