(Not so) Ugly truth

There is no nice way to say it, so I’ll say it straight: naracea consumes memory. Lots of memory, considering it is a text editor. Yes. It is true.

Now, let me explain a bit. When I started working on the editor, I was considering how much memory usage is OK, and I did some calculations of how much RAM will it take to keep the whole history of longer document. After being afraid of the results for a while, I realized that the question is wrong. The right question is: what is the cost of losing some text for me, and the cost of rewriting it. And looking on the problem from this side, I’ve found, that couple of extra megabytes is really, really cheap.

And this is what I’m thinking since then. The memory is cheap. It is so cheap, that you don’t need to think about it. You can buy couple of extra gigabytes of RAM for the price of the dinner, and similar is true for the disk space (well, it is not so true when thinking about SSD drives, but even those are getting cheaper as I type).

I’m regularly testing naracea’s performance on couple of large documents (mostly lorem ipsum with lots of copy & cut & paste as changes), and for my reference document (around 700 thousands of single character changes), it takes about 200MB of RAM to keep all the changes in memory. There is also some more memory consumed when history searches are ongoing, but for document of this size it doesn’t add too much to the overall memory footprint. And here is what I think: 200MB it is nothing. My computer has 8 gigs of RAM, pretty much every laptop you can buy today has at least 3GB of RAM. The only low-memory PCs today are some very cheap netbooks, and yes, people use them to do lots of on-the-road editing and writing, but even there 200MB is almost nothing. Right now I have a tab open in Chrome which uses twice as much memory and I do not find anything bad or scary about it.

So it seems that times when memory consumption was important are over.

On the other hand, saving the document to the file is a completely different story. From the very beginning I knew naracea will need its own proprietary file format. I’ve tried several different persistence strategies (I’ll write about the long and sad story of naracea’s file format evolution in one of the future posts), and what I ended up with for several reasons is XML. The XML it not known as the most succinct format on the planet, and files are very different from memory structures. Files tend to be moved around in emails, on USB sticks and so on, so for file it makes lot of sense to make is as small as possible. Therefore the whole document in XML is compressed while it is being saved, with the compression level set so it gives reasonable file sizes at minimum performance penalty.

So the saved reference document with 700k changes takes around 3.5MB of the disk space. That means approximately 5 bytes for one character in the editor. And I think that’s reasonable price for the features I get from the editor.