4 ms·

Only 250M. ONLY 250M. Gives up and dies I don't mean to be dramatic but this is a huge part of the problem. How is it that the exact same application (email)

Only 250M. ONLY 250M. Gives up and dies I don't mean to be dramatic but this is a huge part of the problem. How is it that the exact same application (email) ran perfectly well on systems with 1M of RAM (and no virtual memory!) and now it takes two-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-megs?

sp332 9y ago
Because... it's not at all the same application? Email used to keep everything on disk and load up one message at a time. Now everything is on the server and has images embedded, so it all gets cached into RAM. If I switch to the "HTML version" of Gmail, the tab takes only 3MB to list my emails. There's also inflation of the content itself. That same HTML view uses over 100MB to render one email with a lot of pictures.
- geofft 9y ago
  Wow - I was going to make a counterargument about how alpine is perfectly capable of keeping everything on disk (and how I usually don't care about images), but my alpine process, which has been running for a bit over a month and is connected via IMAP to a remote server with about 220,000 messages in the inbox, is using 250 MB virtual and 100 MB resident if I'm reading ps right. So maybe Gmail is actually pretty efficient!?
  - sp332 9y ago
    I'm sure the Gmail Android app is nice and light. I'm guessing the RAM bloat in the browser is from the JIT keeping lots of profiling data and cached compiled code, which looks good in benchmarks but does get a little "heavy".
mrob 9y ago
Full Unicode support, including input methods for languages that can't be typed directly on a QWERTY keyboard, takes a lot more than 1MB. Seeing as most of the world's population doesn't speak English, this is a very important improvement.
- ziotom78 9y ago
  Well said.
jononor 9y ago
250MB is around 100'000 pages of text. Or some 150 full HD images. Why such amounts of data needs to be in memory at all times to read/reply to emails, I have no idea.
- varjag 9y ago
  Especially when all heavy lifting is done on the server.
Santosh83 9y ago
It's only the same functionality but not the same application. Mail clients of old were standalone compiled programs that only did one thing. A Chrome process is almost a mini operating system and API layer on top.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  A OS in a sandbox on top of an OS on top of an CPU...
s73ver_ 9y ago
It was doing much, much, much less.
- danaliv 9y ago
  Was it though? Gmail is just a frontend to a system of services running in a data center. All Gmail does on our computers is display data, accept commands, and relay those commands to a server.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    That's a pretty gross oversimplification of things. One of the sibling comments has a pretty good comparison of what Gmail is doing that most 80s email clients weren't.
spc476 9y ago
I'm running mutt, and right now it's only consuming 8.5MB (out of an image size of 12MB). That still feels large to me, but my first computer had only 16K of RAM (I've written larger emails) so I might still have a bias.

sp332 9y ago

Because... it's not at all the same application? Email used to keep everything on disk and load up one message at a time. Now everything is on the server and has images embedded, so it all gets cached into RAM. If I switch to the "HTML version" of Gmail, the tab takes only 3MB to list my emails. There's also inflation of the content itself. That same HTML view uses over 100MB to render one email with a lot of pictures.

geofft 9y ago
Wow - I was going to make a counterargument about how alpine is perfectly capable of keeping everything on disk (and how I usually don't care about images), but my alpine process, which has been running for a bit over a month and is connected via IMAP to a remote server with about 220,000 messages in the inbox, is using 250 MB virtual and 100 MB resident if I'm reading ps right. So maybe Gmail is actually pretty efficient!?
- sp332 9y ago
  I'm sure the Gmail Android app is nice and light. I'm guessing the RAM bloat in the browser is from the JIT keeping lots of profiling data and cached compiled code, which looks good in benchmarks but does get a little "heavy".

mrob 9y ago

Full Unicode support, including input methods for languages that can't be typed directly on a QWERTY keyboard, takes a lot more than 1MB. Seeing as most of the world's population doesn't speak English, this is a very important improvement.

ziotom78 9y ago
Well said.

jononor 9y ago

250MB is around 100'000 pages of text. Or some 150 full HD images. Why such amounts of data needs to be in memory at all times to read/reply to emails, I have no idea.

varjag 9y ago
Especially when all heavy lifting is done on the server.

Santosh83 9y ago

It's only the same functionality but not the same application. Mail clients of old were standalone compiled programs that only did one thing. A Chrome process is almost a mini operating system and API layer on top.

digi_owl 9y ago
A OS in a sandbox on top of an OS on top of an CPU...

s73ver_ 9y ago

It was doing much, much, much less.

danaliv 9y ago
Was it though? Gmail is just a frontend to a system of services running in a data center. All Gmail does on our computers is display data, accept commands, and relay those commands to a server.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  That's a pretty gross oversimplification of things. One of the sibling comments has a pretty good comparison of what Gmail is doing that most 80s email clients weren't.

spc476 9y ago

I'm running mutt, and right now it's only consuming 8.5MB (out of an image size of 12MB). That still feels large to me, but my first computer had only 16K of RAM (I've written larger emails) so I might still have a bias.