[Arm-netbook] OLIMEX A10 board

[lkcl luke]

On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 8:18 AM, Tsvetan Usunov - OLIMEX Ltd
<usunov at olimex.com> wrote:
>> Firefox and office if you run a linux desktop.
>
>
>
> running office on OLinuXino is not priority, there should be an browser
> which feel comfortable in 512MB

 no, there aren't.  it's not the browsers that feel "uncomfortable",
it's the proliferation of AJAX and Web 2.0 which is pushing the
demands and memory usage up to insane levels.

 you're speaking to a group of people with a lot of experience in
software development, and you come from an "embedded" background where
RAM has to be as small as possible.   this is therefore outside of
your experience, and you would do well to listen to peoples' advice,
stop thinking that 512mb RAM is sufficient, and stop thinking in terms
of "it's too expensive, people won't buy it, people won't buy it".

 let me illustrate what we mean by "1gb RAM is necessary":

Mem:   2046104k total,  1830404k used,   215700k free,   152008k buffers
Swap:  7811068k total,  1181072k used,  6629996k free,   151980k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
29926 lkcl      20   0 1402m 811m  14m S    2 40.6 323:09.84 firefox-bin
 4075 root      20   0  304m 102m 2744 S    1  5.1 458:58.17 Xorg
19319 lkcl      20   0  462m  32m 2488 S    1  1.6  20:54.74 plugin-containe
29910 lkcl      20   0  125m  41m 4552 S    1  2.1 105:12.27 skype

so, just adobe flash plugins *ON THEIR OWN* are using 462mb of RAM.
firefox is so stupidly memory-hungry that it's now up to almost 1.5gb,
800mb of which is *RESIDENT*.

but the webkit-based browsers are really no different.  webkit-gtk,
webkit-efb and webkit-dfb all use about 128mb just to start up (whilst
webkit-qt4 is 256mb), then there's a 6mb overhead *per page*, so if
you have multiple tabs open that's 6mb per tab.  then if any
javascript is executed that's where it starts to get expensive, and
you still have to take into accound the insane uncontrollable memory
usage of adobe flash, even in webkit browsers.

but ignoring all that: the most important reason to have 1gb of RAM is
because the potential customers said that they want it!

l.