As I mentioned above, do not ignore the shared memory which gets reported as part of the resident size: yes, gnome-terminal uses 9MB of RAM, but 7MB of those ar

As I mentioned above, do not ignore the shared memory which gets reported as part of the resident size: yes, gnome-terminal uses 9MB of RAM, but 7MB of those are shared libraries like clib, glib, gtk, cairo, freetype - they are all used by the rest of the system and only a single copy of each is loaded, yet counted as part of the shared size for all processes that use it. However, I do agree with your arguments: pushing data around, that's all computers mostly do: from one cache to another, from a hard drive to the controller cache then to disk buffers to application memory then to CPU cache and then backwards. Fewer bytes == faster. Unfortunately for us, the progress here goes backwards and most languages people like to use are not capable of integrating into OS memory management and playing nicer with OS binary loader. VM-based languages like Java and Python will clone their entire VM for each started process, i.e. gnome-terminal rewritten in Java or Ruby will probably eat 20-40MB as opposed to 2-3MB it does now. And Ubuntu is encouraging this - they already have Mono-based Tomboy which launches an entire Mono stack all for itself and they have a couple of tiny Python-based applets to monitor printing jobs, wasting about 10MB each.