The minimum requirement for XP (which was the last 9X windows) is 64MB ram, and 128MB was recommended. That number was increased by SP3, but not to the insane specs you are suggesting.
Minimum of 4GB on 32bit is crazy, as 4GB is the MAXIMUM number of SHARED ram (between system and video) that 32bit can access. Why would the maximum hardware a piece of software is able to handle be the minimum?

Sorry to be slightly off-topic.

1GB system RAM was appropriate for Win9x systems. It is insanity on WinXP systems and functionally impossible on WinVista and up.

WinXP takes about 750KB once loaded in a fairly standard config. Yes, the literature says different; but the literature is just advertising in nerd format.

If your hard drive indicator is on most of the time, all that’s happening is that you are wearing out your hard drive at a frightening pace while wasting 90% of your time waiting for the processor to swap data to and from the hard drive. In a system with sufficient RAM, your hard drive light should rarely come on unless you are starting or stopping a program, accessing the Internet, loading or saving a file, or have a background update going.

Long story short, your employer is only hurting themselves by not updating your memory at the very minimum (the cheapest speed update there is). Rule of thumb? Minimum of 4GB for all XP and up (32 bit) configurations; 6GB for 64 bit WinVista and 8MB for 64 bit Win7. The next best update is a 24″ LCD monitor running at the max resolution of your video display card. And you’ll spend a lot less time clicking and more time working. The boss pays either way; speeding up your hardware just allows you to be more efficient (thus adding more to the bottom line).

“If the file is only 17 MB, surely that is the maximum it will need to consume over the default application memory usage?”

Actually memory usage could be more, why, maybe because there is a need to cache a set of thumbnails also, maybe a search index for faster searches.
Anyway, Excellent article and Commendable research.

@ Leonard,

“is 200Mb really a big deal?”

200 MB and installation time is certainly a big deal.

“100Mb is a drop in the bucket”

No, that is lousy coding. My Netbook has only 512 MB ram.

I’m going to have to strenuously disagree with this. I am working on a 1 GB Ram computer (I would upgrade if it wasn’t at work), and though the processor is not slow, performance in all apps becomes horrendous once RAM usage by FoxIt ramps up to 250 Mb (which it did with just two documents). Application switching takes forever. Add in the fact that I need to have multiple documents open at once to do my research and writing and its a recipe for slow, slow, slow. Too bad you can’t turn page render-caching off. It would probably speed things up for browsing, commenting, and extracting text from the long text documents I’m working with.

Having said that I’ve taken a look. Sumatra does indeed have a small footprint and can even be run from a USB key. The download is around 1.2 MB and it’s about the same once installed. Running without a document loaded it consumes a little over 7 MB of memory.

I loaded Sumatra with a 10 MB document – this took quite a few seconds to appear (it says it is “rendering”). The same delay does not occur with, say, Adobe, where it appears instantly. Once loaded it consumes 17.5 MB of memory, which is consistent with the size of the application and the document loaded into it. However, scrolling around the document soon shot this up to 30 MB usage – again, consistent with the other readers that consume more memory as you scroll around the document.

One thing is clear – Sumatra is quick to display pages and this may be due to the initial rendering that occurred. URL’s within the document are clickable and I haven’t seen any obvious issues with the page rendering. There isn’t any browser integration, however, and whoever thinks that bright yellow is a nice colour for application backgrounds needs shooting

The options available within the application are basic. Definitely no frills here – but if that’s what you’re looking for and aren’t bothered by the lack of browser integration then, to be honest, it’s not too bad. Having said all that, it’s now what I’m after so I’m sticking with Adobe Reader. The Lite version, though.

I have used Acrobat, Foxit, and Sumatra extensively. Sumatra has it all.

Yes, you’re quite correct and that is why the extra memory that Acrobat uses in preference in Foxit didn’t result in me recommending the latter.

Indeed, most of the review was intentionally aimed at the forum that I mentioned at the beginning where little things such as install time and memory usage matters. I don’t agree with that, but that’s what I was trying to address.

Measuring download sizes and install time doesn’t appear relevant, but the vogue these days are for thorough reviews, and that was as thorough as I could get. If indeed it is relevant, then I’m sure most people won’t factor it into their decision.

Thank you for the explanation on the memory usage – Foxit isn’t any quicker and appears to leach memory a lot more, but it’s good to understand why it happens. However, can you explain why it doesn’t release any of the past cached pages? If the file is only 17 MB, surely that is the maximum it will need to consume over the default application memory usage?

However, my end recommendation was for Acrobat Lite in preference to the standard version. Obviously, this isn’t an Adobe version – any comments on why you don’t provide such a version yourselves?

FYI: Readers’s memory increases as you scroll through a document – simple, caching for performance! As you view each page and it is rendered, a rendition is maintained so that returning to the page is instantaneous (as you would expect it to be). Certainly, Reader doesn’t cache EVERYTHING – but is smart enough to use your available memory wisely.

Also, concerning disk space and installation time. You install software ONCE – so if it takes some time, does it really matter? And given the size of disk drives included with every computer today – is 200Mb really a big deal?

So if you could explain some more your desires, it would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect
Adobe Systems