[TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2021 at 01:17:00AM +0200, Tomasz Rola wrote:
> 
> Well, when "everything" was small enough I really liked it. Nowadays
> there seems to be a trend of making Emacs into another OS, like with
> abomination we call the browser.
> 
> https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsApplicationFramework
> 
> As long as I am able to trim it during compilation, they may put
> whatever they want inside, but when I tried to unpack one of the
> latest browser source code, it took more than 2.5 gigabytes (I am not
> sure, it could have been a nightmare). I hope they will not apply this
> crazyness to Emacs. I hope Emacs version 23 will keep compiling for a
> while.

Well, the old joke was that emacs stood for "eight megabytes and
constantly swapping".  These days, sure, starting a fresh Emacs
version 27 process has a SIZE of 364 megabytes with an RSS of 78
megabytes.

OTOH, starting a fresh copy of Konsole (KDE's current terminal
emulator) has a SIZE 1383 megabytes with an RSS of 114 megabytes, and
the single Konsole process running all of my terminal windows has a
SIZE of 2160 megabytes (or just a touch over 2GB) with an RSS of 189
megabytes.

As a percentage of the 32 GB physical memory in my Desktop machine,
I'm not too worried about the memory consumption of either the
terminal windows or emacs, especially since the browser takes a lot
more memory.  These days, I run my browser in a container to limit its
physical memory usage to 12GB; systemd makes setting this up via a
user unit file really easy.  :-)

	      	      	      	    - Ted

# ~/.config/systemd/chrome.service
[Unit]
Description=Chrome Browser

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/google-chrome
KillMode=process
MemoryAccounting=true
MemoryMax=12G

P.S.  On my laptop I constrain the browser to only use 8GB, which just
means that if I keep huge numbers of tabs open, some of them might get
automatically killed and will have to get reloaded when I swtich back
to that tab.  Sure, this wouldn't fly on a PDP-11, but as long as I'm
more productive, I don't really worry about it.