> My scrollback buffers are limited to 4096 lines and I have 7 tabs open, four of which are sitting on a bash prompt doing nothing. By ANY measure, this is absolutely insane.
Why? Is it using CPU while doing nothing? Scrollback might need at least 4096 lines * 7 tabs * 80 unicode chars =~ 5MB, conservatively. You have 7 child shell environments, and perhaps 7 large bitmaps cached for fast scrolling (I don't know what gnome-terminal caches for rendering, just guessing about what's possible). Plus the program code, the UI code, the terminal fonts. You haven't really explained why 60MB seems like too much to you, let alone "insane". It seems like you're just not accounting for all the features.
> Rendering TEXT with a library intended to render gmail.com and facebook.com is a ludicrous extravagance.
Why? Isn't it possible if the text rendering library were customized and smaller, that it would then consume more memory because it would be a 2nd library can't be shared with your HTML+CSS renderer, and you need those loaded too anyway?
The whole reason the library is big is because it does a lot of things. What reason is there for small/simple uses to not use a library that's already there?
> Yes, waiting 20 billion cycles on an amdahl-adjusted basis to move a scrollbar is definitely the future.
Your scrollbar takes multiple seconds to respond? Mine doesn't.
Your hyperbole notwithstanding, the reasons that browsers speculatively over-allocate is for caching - it is precisely because it's more efficient and performant that way. I didn't write Chrome, but I don't think what they've done is insane.
Why? Is it using CPU while doing nothing? Scrollback might need at least 4096 lines * 7 tabs * 80 unicode chars =~ 5MB, conservatively. You have 7 child shell environments, and perhaps 7 large bitmaps cached for fast scrolling (I don't know what gnome-terminal caches for rendering, just guessing about what's possible). Plus the program code, the UI code, the terminal fonts. You haven't really explained why 60MB seems like too much to you, let alone "insane". It seems like you're just not accounting for all the features.
> Rendering TEXT with a library intended to render gmail.com and facebook.com is a ludicrous extravagance.
Why? Isn't it possible if the text rendering library were customized and smaller, that it would then consume more memory because it would be a 2nd library can't be shared with your HTML+CSS renderer, and you need those loaded too anyway?
The whole reason the library is big is because it does a lot of things. What reason is there for small/simple uses to not use a library that's already there?
> Yes, waiting 20 billion cycles on an amdahl-adjusted basis to move a scrollbar is definitely the future.
Your scrollbar takes multiple seconds to respond? Mine doesn't.
Your hyperbole notwithstanding, the reasons that browsers speculatively over-allocate is for caching - it is precisely because it's more efficient and performant that way. I didn't write Chrome, but I don't think what they've done is insane.