this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It comes from the words "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping".

Yeah, the name hasn't aged well..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's about 80MB on my machine right now... What is an absurd amount of memory for an empty editor, but I had to sort top by process name because there are some 10 pages of stuff that reserve no memory at all, 2 where it goes from non-zero to 100MB, and a fucking lot of pages of stuff using more than 100MB.

WTF is my computer doing with all that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Just keeping a single frame buffer image can take tens of megabytes nowadays, so 100MB isn't all that much. Also 64-bit can easily double the memory consumption, given how pointer-happy the ELISP data structures can be (this is somewhat based on my assumptions, I don't actually know the memory layouts of the different Emacs data structures ;)).

But I don't truly know, though. If I start a terminal-only Emacs without any additional lisp code it takes "only" 59232 kilobytes of resident memory. Still more than I'd expect. I'd expect something like 2 MB. But I'll survive.