Re:Why interpreters matter (at least for high level programm...
by Periodic on Sunday May 13, 2012 @12:34PM
(#3967418)
For a major site with any sort of budget, RAM is a secondary concern. For my small, personal sites that have very little traffic I want as little memory usage as possible. Having a DB server, web server, a few websites including some that run outside Apache and are proxied to (e.g. mongrel) I find myself easily hitting the 256-512MB limits of cheap virtual machines. Upgrading to the next highest tier can sometimes mean doubling my monthly bill. I don't even think of running Java servers.
This isn't a major concern, but I wanted to point out that anyone on a budget will want memory usage to at least be reasonable. It impacts our ability to experiment and play if we are bound by memory constraints.
Re:Why interpreters matter (at least for high level programm...
by PaulHoule on Sunday May 13, 2012 @03:21PM
(#3967969)
The memory consumption of data ~is~ a big issue for the web sites I build because it makes the minimum increment of capacity on AMZN web services larger.
Memory consumption of code just isn't an issue because my data is at least 10,000x bigger than the code
I've seen that some people are concerned about webapp memory consumption, and that might be very real for CGI scripts (I remember memory being primary in 1999), but working with PHP, Java and ASP.NET, I see code size as a secondary concern. Facebook developed HipHop because CPU time really is the bottleneck with PHP; and I can say that when I need to upgrade a busy PHP box it's nowhere near running out of memory.
Now there are embedded systems, and sometimes there it's worth making radical efforts to shoehorn things. Some people do it for work, some people do it for a hobby, but if I'm programming for fun I've got better things to do than scrutinizing my toolchain to squeeze out everything that wastes memory so I can run Linux in 8MB of RAM.