Once upon a time, when I was an young and naive Amiga user I used to mock Windows entusiast for their sheer waste of resources: it needed a whopping 4 megabytes of memory! When I switched to Linux I started to enjoy the benefits of memory protection and a real mult-user operative systems and I started to soften my wrath.
Nowadays I do acknoledge that web browers requires quite a lot of resources. Yet I am somehow mithered to discover the sheer amount of memory used by the most commodity of the applications, that is a basic calculator. Yesterday I was amazed to discover the memory usage of Gnome calculator: I can understand that its virtual memory pages can be as large as 2586M, i.e. more than two gigabytes and half and that the shared size is 107 megabytes. We do live in a world of 64 bit machiens and all those shared libraries are used by dozens of running programs.
Yet the difference between the Resident Set Size and the shared is a whopping fifty-eight megabytes for a calculator, the most commodity of applications.
We all need to turn to frugal computing!