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Comment by georgefrick | Hacker News Reader

As I sit here on Sunday afternoon, trying to get a Phaser game to run on an iPad 2; I read this and think "We haven't stopped caring, we care when it's a specified business requirement".

This bites us in the ass, because I can't make Wistia (for example) stop eating all the memory on this thing with my app running next to it.

So, personally, I stopped caring when it was not a priority and didn't, on average, affect user experience. But; it was a mistake and I am watching memory/etc more and more these days. This is for various reasons (old hardware, more than one app on a page, growing amount of bundled media content, etc).

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You've just reminded me of how much I hate iTunes and the CPU/memory hog it is... And the other app I'm forced to use, Xcode...

No warning, no error, mobile safari just kills the tab. It's not fun. Optimize images, optimize audio, stream audio, stream images, reduce text, pack text, pack everything. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Still crashes. How do people work with Apple stuff? I got a macbook and xcode, it lets me view logs/etc, but nothing helpful.

We stopped caring because it didn't matter. Except when it began to matter it was too late. Somethings you have to plan for from the start. You can't go back later and fix it after the fact.

Even switching from "copy and allocate objects everywhere" to non-copying native IO can improve your memory efficiency and usability.

I am working on an Android app, and rewrote the part that handles the connection via a binary protocol over a socket with a remote server. Rewriting that to take advantage of NIO already improved connection times (build up a connection, initialize, etc) from almost 2 minutes to only 8 or 9 seconds. RAM usage of the backend was reduced by 50% – and it is easier readable.

More often than not it’s not that hard to add it, if one carefully thinks about the requirements and future extensions at every step.

> More often than not it’s not that hard to add it, if one carefully thinks about the requirements and future extensions at every step.

Is that argument to think about memory from the start or to not think about it until absolutely necessary? :)

If you don’t want to think about memory from the start, at least think about making your code in a way that you can exchange it later on with memory-conscious code.

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