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In preparations for a talk about .NET and Java interoperability at OOP 2004, I'm currently running a complete interoperability environment on my laptop. I can - theoretically at least - communicate using .NET 1.1, Indigo (in VM), BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Glue, Axis/Tomcat, Janeva, JNBridge, and Ja.NET. This communication uses everything from Web Services, .NET Remoting, RMI-via-IIOP down to proprietary protocols. Most of it actually even works.
Of course, running all this with just a gigabyte of RAM isn't too much fun. Add the necessary IDEs for .NET and Java, the two Java app servers and the Longhorn VM, and you are pretty much hitting a 2 GB pagefile quicker than you can say "memory exhaustion". Planning to run these demos on multiple VMs to include machines in different domains didn't help too much in terms of memory conservation either.
No worries, though. I've been thinking about upgrading this notebook to an (albeit quite costly) total of 2 gigs of RAM anyway. Add a nice 2 or 3 GB pagefile and you can go where no notebook has gone before.
Right after thinking along these lines, some "red alert" signs must have lit up, and from the back of my mind, voices were talking to me: "thirty two bits. Don't forget the third two bits." At first I ignored them. 5GB of virtual RAM ought to be enough for everybody. But the voices continued "you ain't gonna get five gigs of virtual RAM with only thirty two bits"
And suddenly I realized. Chris Brumme has been right: "This is increasingly the case for client machines, too. It’s clear that many customers are bumping up against the hard limits of 32-bit processing.".
Yours truly - facing the realities of computing on a daily basis.
Additional information: Funnily enough, I've been discussing this very issue with a client of mine just a couple of weeks ago as it's actually a very good idea to consider these limits when building web server clusters. I just didn't think of this boundary in terms of my notebook. I mean, hey, a client machine isn't supposed to hit an architectural limit of your processor, right?
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