Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!pacbell!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!andrew.cmu.edu!jk3k+ From: jk3k+@andrew.cmu.edu (Joe Keane) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Average Program Size Message-ID: Date: 1 Apr 88 04:34:51 GMT References: <1840@winchester.mips.COM> <514@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <1988Mar18.174031.653@utzoo.uucp> <10018@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>, <645@setting.weitek.UUCP> Organization: Carnegie Mellon University Lines: 26 In-Reply-To: <645@setting.weitek.UUCP> In article <10018@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> davidsen@kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr) writes: > As nearly as I can determine, workstations are used for graphics, >software development, word processing, reading news, and reading mail. >They are used to provide a windowing platform with NFS, and generally >the programs run are less than 1 min cpu, less than 2MB memory >(exculding the graphics display). > > I realize that some places may not offer mainframe power for large >problems, but I doubt that it's common to run really large stuff on a >workstation. I'm sure that if others disagree I'll see it here. Well here i am on a Sun-3 Andrew workstation, and what's the limiting factor? _Memory_, by a long shot over CPU speed. Let's see what we've got: window manager, 1M (blame the picture background); Console (monitor mail and much much more), 1M; Gnu-Emacs, 1M (2M if i've been editing); Messages (reading everything and writing this message), 2M. Resident sizes are about half that. These are my default programs; i haven't added in the real memory hogs (large rasters, large tree searches). Add in 1M for the kernel and run it on a 4M machine. It's not pretty (he says as the disk drive makes terrible noises), and it's not fast. Actually right now i'm cheating and running across four machines (fast as hell), but don't try this during peak hours. --Joe