Of course it’s all about end customer at the end of the day. And of course questions you bring asking whether customer is willing to pay for extra quality are valid.

Answers however aren’t simple. I neither have paid for Firefox nor for TweetDeck and it isn’t likely to change.

The only power I have is I can start using Internet Explorer or Chrome and check Twitter on the web instead. Actually I switched to Chrome but it still sucks in terms of usability so I’m back with Firefox.

It’s not always about money customer is willing to pay for application – it’s the question about whole business model.

Usually in the long run better applications win if competitors can put similar effort into marketing and/or sales. Sometimes better apps win despite of lack of strong marketing/sales.

The question is about a way you choose – how many compromises you can accept? Is compromising on quality one of them? Do you care about resources or “they’ll buy more RAM and new CPUs?”

I won’t give you right answer. They depend on situation of your product and your company.

Either way 500MB of RAM for internet browser is an exaggeration.

“with this new programming language and its virtual machine memory leaks are now a thing of the past” (same goes for so called “Unexpected Application Errors”)

“well, you get short of memory, buy more RAM, it’s so cheap” or “your app is too slow, buy faster CPU”

isn’t computer history evolving in cycles? unfortunately, our competitors also have access to those faster CPUs and cheap RAM, don’t they?

the real question is: how to stay rid of memory leaks and still within budget. High performance and leak free systems do typically cost a little bit more to produce. If the management does take extra testing and disciplined programming process into account when preparing budget, will they persuade end customer to adopt extra cost? Will they meet with their applause?

That’s the bottom line. Prices must go down. At least a little bit. Companies must adopt tight budgets. Otherwise they turn less competitive. Those tight budgets must exclude something, that is not absolutely necessary, ughh… like some testing or code reviews … and there we go… ram consumption growing

There are a few niche markets where they do actually create Software Requirements Documents with Performance Requirements and Resource Consumption sections included. They do because, if they did not, for instance human life could be endangered or their world’s competitor could perform same thing a little bit faster or more efficient. I did have an honour to work for such a business.

All less critical apps (including browsers or telephony gadgets) have to live with occasional reset, I guess.

I agree that “If a developer hasn’t handled memory usage well then this should be picked up in testing and the code bounced back to the developer. Memory usage should be on the developers list of tests.“

The real problem is that most of the time it’s neither picked up during testing nor put on developers list of tests. I know everyone would find a number of reasons why it isn’t done in given situation and it will be oh so understandable. Except that’s looking for excuses for building crappy apps.

I assure you I know why it’s better when developers have stations with much processing power and you should treat the idea as it was thrown with a tongue in my cheek but the problem is real. Acknowledgement that developers and/or quality engineers should do something about it doesn’t move us any further.

People (managers) want software fast. They buy into the latest technology BS, because they think it will make better applications in less time (it won’t.)

Problem is, the new new stuff always uses more memory and resources than the last.

If you want a lean app, ask for it to be written against the plain Win32 APIs in C or C++.

But then again, there aren’t many real programmers left who know how.. So you’re going to be stuck with this situation.

Just my two cents

The importance of memory usage is something that is decided at the project as well as at the developer level. I can see how much memory my computer is using if I have 64m or 64g so why waste developers time with a slow machine.

If a developer hasn’t handled memory usage well then this should be picked up in testing and the code bounced back to the developer. Memory usage should be on the developers list of tests.

Unfortunately you’ll meet quite a lot of developers who expect they’ll have all processing power and all memory of the world available for their application. “RAM and processors are cheap these days they’d say.“

Well, maybe they are but it doesn’t automatically change computers your app will be working on. Share the pain of your users. Or at least try.

I guess I’d need to blow some steam too if someone seriously told me I should switch to worse machine than I already have.

Anyway next time I’m going to cut at least resources for testing environment by a half, no matter what developers would request…

That’s exactly a trick. You were aware of the issue so you did something about it. Other way it’ll be there until your user would start calling you to fix it or something would advise in his rant to buy all of you crappy machines to work on.

Of course, no matter what the solution is, we both agree that there is a problem with memory hungry, unoptimized, slow software that tends to be the rule nowadays.