Re: RAM usage of applications?

[Marc Feeley]

> On Nov 30, 2019, at 10:55 AM, Lassi Kortela <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>>> The Chicken DLL is about 3.4MB, of which a good deal will be relocation 
>>> tables and such.  I'm a Cygwin user, so my C library is included in 
>>> cygwin1.dll, which is about the same size [...]  The native Windows C 
>>> library, also a DLL, is about 1MB, depending on the OS version [...]
>> So the RAM footprint at run time for the executable code (excluding the OS) 
>> will be on the order of 12KB + 3.4MB + 3.4MB + 1MB, so about 8MB.  I think 
>> that is a better measure when estimating the amount of RAM needed to run an 
>> application.
> 
> The RAM taken by the DLLs ought to be shared with other running programs 
> using the same DLLs. If we assume the user's program is the only Chicken 
> program running at the time, but there are other Windows/Cygwin programs, the 
> Chicken program would be 12KB + 3.4MB on top of those.

Indeed the level of sharing will affect the total RAM footprint.  At another 
extreme (the best case scenario), when there are many Scheme programs running, 
then the actual footprint per Scheme program will be closer to 12KB.  But my 
suspicion is that the situation described by egarrulo (512 MB RAM) is an 
embedded or dedicated system where there’s probably just one program/service 
running.  Anyway, in this particular case (512 MB RAM) I can’t imagine any 
Scheme system no being able to run with that much RAM.  For reference, many 
years back Gambit was able to run on a 4MB RAM nintendo DS, and that included a 
remote REPL over wifi.

Marc