Comments on: Shaving megabytes: cplay and mcplay

By: Links 19/3/2010: Google’s TV Project, OpenOffice.org Turning 10, OSBC | Boycott Novell

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:13:34 +0000

[...] Shaving megabytes: cplay and mcplay A few months ago I mentioned mcplay as an alternative to the time-honored but unfortunately departed cplay. mcplay is intended to be a close mimic to the dead program, written in C as opposed to Python. At the time I made no real distinction between the two, since my concern was mostly with function, but as yasen mentioned, I should have. [...]

By: reacocard

reacocard — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 04:43:25 +0000

@patrick – ah, you are correct. A python file with nothing but input() in it (the smallest i could think of that would stay open for inspection) clocks in at about 3.6MB. Python would probably do slightly better on a 32 bit system though as it uses a lot of pointers.

I also installed mcplay for comparison – its using a mere 1.5MB. Quite impressive.

By: patrick

patrick — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:22:31 +0000

@reacocard

A blank python shell is more than just the python interpreter. A more accurate example would be the memory usage of a (almost) blank python script.

By: Mikko

Mikko — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:34:00 +0000

ogg123 is good enough for me

By: reacocard

reacocard — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:36:51 +0000

The memory use difference is usually worst on the low end of python programs, since the python interpreter itself has pretty substantial overhead. On my 64bit Arch system, a blank python shell (just type python at the prompt, no arguments) takes about 4.4MB, while cplay uses 6.8MB. So cplay itself it actually reasonably light, it’s just being dragged down by the inherent overhead in python. Larger-scale apps tend to have much less difference in memory use between those written in python and C, as the overhead of the interpreter becomes largely eclipsed. Not that that matters much for your use case.