hardware
We recently upgraded our database server to 48 GB of memory -- because hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Imagine our surprise, then, when we rebooted the server and saw only 32 GB of memory available in Windows Server 2008. Did we install the memory wrong? No, the BIOS
c++
Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen
operating systems
Windows Vista has a radically different approach to memory management. Check out the "Physical Memory, Free" column in my Task Manager: At the time this screenshot was taken, this machine had a few instances of IE7 running, plus one remote desktop. I'm hardly doing anything at
browser
I like Firefox. I've even grown to like it slightly more than IE6, mostly because it has a far richer add-on ecosystem. But I have one serious problem with Firefox: This screenshot was taken after a few days of regular Firefox usage. That's over 900 megabytes
c++
In a recent post, Scott Koon proposes that to be a really good .NET programmer, you also need to be a really good C++ programmer: If you’ve spent all your life working in a GC’ed language, why would you ever need to know how memory management works, let
.net
Mark Russinovich recently posted a blog entry bemoaning the bloated footprint of managed .NET apps compared to their unmanaged equivalents. He starts by comparing a trivial managed implementation of Notepad to the one that ships with Windows: First notice the total CPU time consumed by each process. Remember, all I’
regex
I am currently in the middle of a way-overdue refactoring of MhtBuilder, which uses regular expressions extensively. I noticed that I had sort of mindlessly added RegexOptions.Compiled all over the place. It says “compiled” so it must be faster, right? Well, like so many other things, that depends: In
.net
One of the great features of .NET is the automatic garbage collection that absolves the developer of worrying about C++ style memory management, where for every allocate, there must be a destroy, or you're leaking. And yet, I frequently see overzealous developers write code like this: Public Function