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freddyzdead · 11-26-2012, 09:27 PM

Well, thank you for your patient response and I apologize for bumbling into your forum. I'm using Calibre 0.9.5 btw. Not old. I can't help noticing that I'm not the only one having clogging issues. My Toshiba is not top-of-the-line or anything, but it is dual-core and has 2 GB RAM and I've never had any speed problems. Until Calibre. What I didn't realize before is that when I first noticed the trouble, all it was doing was LOADING the books, not even converting or anything. That's what took 3+ hours. The converting is what's taken days on end.

Up until now, I've regarded Microsoft Office as the pinnacle of inefficient programming. But the only thing that comes close to Calibre is Opera when I've got about 50 tabs open. I try not to do that as it uses huge amounts of memory.

But it's obvious that Python is the problem here; it has an enormous run-time library, that no one ever mentions. It has to execute masses of code just to do even the simplest of tasks. I am old enough to remember when real programs were written in Assembler and a program that actually did useful stuff was less than 64 kilobytes. And that was when programs had to provide their own drivers for video, audio, etc. The trouble started with Basic, which allowed almost anybody to write "programs" just by learning a scripting language. Things only got worse from then on. Now the landscape is littered with compilers and top-heavy runtime modules. Maybe it's Dennis Ritchie's fault, because most of them look a lot like "C". So now we need multi-core processors and gigabytes of RAM to get the same performance we used to get from an 8086 with 640KB. Well, almost.

What I mean is, we've just about lost contact with our roots; even Microsoft has stopped worrying overmuch about backwards compatibility. 64-bit Windows can no longer run 16-bit programs. So what? you might say, but it's important.

Maybe the shift toward mobile computing will slow down the rot.

Actually, Calibre just now finished the conversion and is now idling, for which it is using a mere 90 MB. Good grief.

11-26-2012, 09:27 PM	#14
freddyzdead Junior Member Posts: 3 Karma: 10 Join Date: Nov 2012 Device: Ainol Novo 7 Elf	Well, thank you for your patient response and I apologize for bumbling into your forum. I'm using Calibre 0.9.5 btw. Not old. I can't help noticing that I'm not the only one having clogging issues. My Toshiba is not top-of-the-line or anything, but it is dual-core and has 2 GB RAM and I've never had any speed problems. Until Calibre. What I didn't realize before is that when I first noticed the trouble, all it was doing was LOADING the books, not even converting or anything. That's what took 3+ hours. The converting is what's taken days on end. Up until now, I've regarded Microsoft Office as the pinnacle of inefficient programming. But the only thing that comes close to Calibre is Opera when I've got about 50 tabs open. I try not to do that as it uses huge amounts of memory. But it's obvious that Python is the problem here; it has an enormous run-time library, that no one ever mentions. It has to execute masses of code just to do even the simplest of tasks. I am old enough to remember when real programs were written in Assembler and a program that actually did useful stuff was less than 64 kilobytes. And that was when programs had to provide their own drivers for video, audio, etc. The trouble started with Basic, which allowed almost anybody to write "programs" just by learning a scripting language. Things only got worse from then on. Now the landscape is littered with compilers and top-heavy runtime modules. Maybe it's Dennis Ritchie's fault, because most of them look a lot like "C". So now we need multi-core processors and gigabytes of RAM to get the same performance we used to get from an 8086 with 640KB. Well, almost. What I mean is, we've just about lost contact with our roots; even Microsoft has stopped worrying overmuch about backwards compatibility. 64-bit Windows can no longer run 16-bit programs. So what? you might say, but it's important. Maybe the shift toward mobile computing will slow down the rot. Actually, Calibre just now finished the conversion and is now idling, for which it is using a mere 90 MB. Good grief.