Re: PURESIZE increased (again)

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote"

   > Why?  What's the _downside_ of adding a fudge factor to puresize?

   It makes the memory footprint larger.

By a completely negligible percentage (a fraction of a percent),
obviously not enough to worry about or waste any time on trying to
reduce it further.  Certainly not in the CVS version, where
BASE_PURESIZE needs to be increased all the time and the only
non-negligible effects of making the fudge factor even tinier are to
increase the frequency of the required increases and to force most CVS
user to increase the value locally if they have a very few small
uninstalled changes.

Comparing my present pure-bytes-used of 1200904 with the 1036280 from
an old CVS version of 2005-02-07, suggests that pure-bytes-used is
currently growing faster than 13 percent a year (between the the
reference points I used it grew at an annualized rate of 13.7
percent).  I do not know whether such a rate of growth constitutes a
problem.  I have no real figures, but I would guess that the amount of
memory available on the average computer grows even faster than 14
percent a year, in which case the growth of pure-bytes-used does not
represent a real problem.

Anyway, whether the rate of growth of pure-bytes-used represents a
problem or not, reducing the fudge-factor from a fraction of one
percent to an even tinier fraction of one percent is completely
meaningless.  As long as that fudge factor stays within one percent,
it stays negligible and does not contribute to the rate of growth.

Sincerely,

Luc.