this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
911 points (95.0% liked)
Programmer Humor
32410 readers
335 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It comes from the words "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping".
Yeah, the name hasn't aged well..
It's about 80MB on my machine right now... What is an absurd amount of memory for an empty editor, but I had to sort top by process name because there are some 10 pages of stuff that reserve no memory at all, 2 where it goes from non-zero to 100MB, and a fucking lot of pages of stuff using more than 100MB.
WTF is my computer doing with all that?
Just keeping a single frame buffer image can take tens of megabytes nowadays, so 100MB isn't all that much. Also 64-bit can easily double the memory consumption, given how pointer-happy the ELISP data structures can be (this is somewhat based on my assumptions, I don't actually know the memory layouts of the different Emacs data structures ;)).
But I don't truly know, though. If I start a terminal-only Emacs without any additional lisp code it takes "only" 59232 kilobytes of resident memory. Still more than I'd expect. I'd expect something like 2 MB. But I'll survive.