tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

On optimizing software for speed..

Okay, I dont even try to understand much of this subject, but one interesting observation I have done lately.

As I am going to give back the Novell laptop in a few days, I have been moving stuff into my old, black Powerbook. I installed Ubuntu on it. It has 380 megabytes of memory and the processor is a 500MHz PowerPC G3.

This Thinkpad has a gig of ram and the cpu is 1.6 GHz. They feel equally fast in practice.

Whenever I want to swap a desktop workspace etc on the thinkpad, it munches the disk. There is an awful lot of "spin the disk" action going on all the time. All I can say (since I dont really pretend of being able to give advice on this subject to l33t hax0rs ) is that I do really agree that we have a features over optimized code issue. Every little thing that we start opens a whole lot of stuff from the disk. My gig machine is also swapping from just Firefox, Evolution and Gimp. Yes, we need to focus on optimizing stuff. The functionality we have gained in the last few years is amazing - but we have also gained in size and become a bit slow in our walking..