@asuffield said:I have a pretty low opinion of systems where a few megabytes is considered an acceptable load for a very simple application.You need about 200-300kb for a reasonable, functional audio player. For several Mb I would expect at least a track preference/recommendation system rather than a crude playlist.
Winamp 5.5 for me, is 6.3 MB with a pretty trim line-up, 7.6 with the third-party plugins that make it such an awesome program. It's not a very trim, lean program, although I've reverted to 5.094's PII-optimised in_mp3 to get some speed up. I could use a simple media player if I wanted, but Winamp affords me a centralised player of not just MP3, but also tracker music and old DOS game music in CMF, and it has cue sheet support for DJ mixes, some of this with the help of the hard work of so many third party developers. I tried some sidtune players for it, but they all sucked, as did the Amiga custom module player as I recall. DeliPlayer is the absolute ultimate play-everything program for DOS/Amiga nostagists, but the UI sucks rocks. I've already recorded some Amiga custom modules to MP3 to play in Winamp.
Firefox isn't too bad in recent releases, although you're advised to do any ... JPEG surfing in a new window and close that entirely when done to wipe the RAM cache so that it will release your memory. (It also means you can close a lot of tabs on mass; I miss Close Right Tabs.)
Some programs, though, are just stupid. Inkscape leaks horrendously, reaching 100 MB after maybe 20 minutes on only the most trivial little image. Thunderbird uses up to 30 MB for goodness knows what reason. Pidgin, bless it's heart, also has a slow leak that after not that many days is up to 50 MB or more. The developers refuse to accept that it's a leak, but honestly, with every window but the buddy list closed, what on earth is it saving 50 MB of? I don't have the History plugin running either.
Process Explorer leaks, too, it seems. Windows Explorer leaks entire BROWSEUI.DLL threads, until it has so many old threads lying around that Windows is out of window handles and you can't even open a menu any more until you close an existing window. I've oddly not had that happen lately, perhaps I reboot before it gets so bad that I have to slay Explorer. But it's so common for apps to leak -- turning off the PC at night at least serves the purpose of clearing the mess out and starting over, but I just get to go on a killing spree and take out everything that's sprung one.
The only leak I know of on my Mac OS 9 box is Outlook Express 5. It's a wonderful app, and far more efficient than Thunderbird, but if you use it for IMAP, it causes the kernel to leak RAM. After 60 days uptime, the kernel may have leaked maybe 35 MB? I forget quite how much ... not a lot, but the system does start to slowly grind to a halt at this point and rebooting is necessary. It's the only thing I've ever seen that causes OS 9's kernel to leak RAM, not that RAM leaking seems to occur on 9 at all. The memory model probably got it noticed and nailed very fast ...