Overhead of individual python apps

[Paul Boddie]

Steve Holden wrote:
> Even embedded systems are much larger now than the minicomputers of
> yesteryear. Everything's relative. Just wait three years!

Had you placed such a bet in 2000, you'd have cleaned up at the
"Moore's Law Casino", but there are various factors at work now which
complicate the once-inevitable trends of hardware performance and the
corresponding advice to people wishing to speed up or slim down their
software: the flattening out of the CPU frequency curve and the
tendency of CPU manufacturers to choose multiple core strategies are
two things which prevent applications from speeding up all by
themselves; whilst storage density is still increasing, as far as I
know, I'd imagine other strategies being adopted in system architecture
which could make performance tradeoffs more pronounced in accessing all
that storage.

In other words, expect many more threads about global interpreter locks
in the coming three years than we've seen in the last three or even six
years. ;-)

Paul