Most resource heavy/bloated computer software?

Discussion in 'Water Cooler' started by CM30, Feb 6, 2014.

  1. CM30

    CM30 Regular Member

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    We've often heard talk from open source advocates and feature haters of how scripts like vBulletin or Invision Power Board contain 'too many' things or are supposedly inefficient due to having reams and reams of code and heavy computer/server requirements.

    But what software would you say truly comes under that? What scripts and software are so absolutely gigantic that just waiting for the download takes forever? What ones have an almost 'everything and the kitchen sink' mentality to their design?

    Personally, I'd say it's probably a close call between Moodle (see my article here about why that thing is the most ridiculously inefficient CMS on the planet) and just about any 'professional' development environment tool.
     
  2. AWS

    AWS Administrator

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    I was actually surprised that the vbulletin 5 download over 5 gigs. It was the largest set of scripts I ever downloaded.

    Wordpress goes the other way. It is a very small download.

    The difference between the 2 is Wordpress give you the basics to get a blog setup. You add functionality to it with plugins. This keeps initial size down. IPB is the same although is a bit larger. With vbulletin you have a whole lot of new code just thrown in the old.
     
  3. CM30

    CM30 Regular Member

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    Are you serious?

    vBulletin 5, over 5 GBs? What the bloody hell does it include, the software has LESS features than the last two versions! Is their code that much less efficient now?
     
  4. GTB

    GTB Regular Member

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    You sure about that? 5 gigs, that's a humongous download size for forum software. Sure you don't mean 5MB.
     
  5. AWS

    AWS Administrator

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    I was wrong. I meant to say megs. The zip is exactly 10.8M unextracted. Takes up 25.7M on disk when extracted.
     
  6. Dan Hutter

    Dan Hutter aka Big Dan

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    Xenforo's download is pretty large too. I forget the size exactly ~5 MB. I usually upload the whole zip then extract and move the files server side. Uploading the unzipped files takes forever.

    Back to computer software:

    I'll vote for Outlook even on decent hardware it takes a noticeable time to load with a decent sized mail box and the feature bloat is just ridiculous. One of my clients computers I maintained used Outlook for everything and I used to *hate* wrestling with Outlook with it's obsure settings buried 5 menus deep. :arghh:

    Adobe products are pretty bloated too. I remember using InDesign & PhotoShop back when I worked for a local newspaper. They didn't have the beefiest of hardware but it was decent and it took forever to load both apps. My boss got all sorts of pissed that I installed Paint.Net. For the most part all I did was crop pictures and convert to gray scale for print. I didn't need all the extras PS had, PDN loaded in a 3rd of the time and didn't eat RAM like nobodys business.
     
  7. CM30

    CM30 Regular Member

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    Well, I may as well update with another one; Eclipse. Those development environment programs are absolutely ridiculous in terms of file size and set up, and the fact I had to download a 200 odd MB java development system before I could even install the 200 MB main part of the software makes it even more over the top.

    Ah well, the bloat isn't quite as bad as figuring out how to configure the damn thing in terms of options. I mean, I was lucky enough that the equivalent systems at work were already set up before I started, yet now I've somehow got to figure out how to replicate that myself from scratch.
     
  8. Adrian Schneider

    Adrian Schneider Regular Member

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    +1 for Eclipse. If you have memory to dedicate to it, it can perform beautifully. You can edit the JVM settings for it and feed it more memory. I gave it 2GB and it worked really well. On my laptop, that just wasn't practical though. So now I use vim/tmux (essentially linux as an IDE ) and I'm much happier. Snappy on a crappy laptop, or my beefy desktop workstation. If needed, I can SSH from one to the other for anything more intensive (plus saves battery life + bandwidth if I'm out).

    XenForo is larger because it includes Zend Framework. More modern applications would rely on Composer (a package manager) to download those dependencies after the fact rather than have it all distributed together. 1, 2 or even 5 MBs is getting large for a "PHP script", but once you start looking at them as applications, it's really not bad at all. We're getting more complex configuration, language files, templates, front-end assets, etc. so it's somewhat natural for the package filesizes to increase. I wouldn't say it's necessarily bloat.

    Keeping things small is always hard. It takes a lot of design discipline and sacrifice.
     
  9. ZeroHour

    ZeroHour Regular Member

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    Good old Visual Studio, she keeps growing with every version but I do like it as an IDE (non web programming that is)
    Any Adobeware is also very bloaty, when you install CS so much bundled crap comes along with Photoshop etc its a farce.
     

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