Re: buffers and virtual memory

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

   If you habitually have 40 or 50 buffers open at a time, how much
   ram+swap space do you have on that system to be comfortable with that?

My main machine has 128 megabytse of RAM and 204M of swap.

But I also run Emacs on a test machine with 23M of RAM and 64M of swap.
Emacs usually does not take up more than 20 megabytes or so (this is
in X Windows).

In the past I have run Emacs on much smaller machines.  I am pretty
sure you could run a contemporary Emacs with as little as 8M of RAM.

In 1997, Noah Friedman <friedman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote some patches
to the old Emacs version 18.59 so he could build it on a Linux/GNU
system in ELF format.  He said:

    ... , it is small enough (even linked with X) that I can run it
    on the tiny little 4MB test system I use to test kernels, without
    thrashing the vm.

People often complain that Emacs is a resource hog; my experience is
that that is true only if you build it to provide lots of
applications.  If you build Emacs with fewer functions, it takes less
space.  Back in the 1980s, I built an Emacs in under half a megabyte.
It had the features of an editor for a character-only terminal or
xterm and nothing else.

-- 

    Robert J. Chassell                  bob@xxxxxxxxxxx
    Rattlesnake Enterprises             http://www.rattlesnake.com

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