I was reading Wesnew Moise's blog earlier this morning and when reading Are Objects Cheap, I stumbled upon this observation:
I use SharpReader, a RSS reader that is written in managed code and consumes a large amount of memory--almost 200 MBs on a typical session.
This reminded me of the days I used SharpReader, which have since long passed for the very reason Wes points out - SharpReader is a memory hog. I had no better luck with RssBandit either, and have since switched to using BlogLines since it only takes up the same resources as my browser.
Note: I have not tried RSS aggregators other than RSSBandit and SharpReader, so the following comments apply only to these two aggregators...
Why are RSS aggregators so bloated? Are they too bloated? I think Luke and Dare, the creators of SharpReader and RssBandit, aren't too worried about bloat because their primary customers are fellow developers, who have dev machines with oodles of RAM. Or maybe they are concerned about bloat, but instead focus their limited time on adding new features, keeping up with the specs, and improving other features of their products.
For me, I don't see myself returning to either of these two aggregators until the bloat problem is solved or I get more RAM. Having multiple browsers opened (IE and FireBird, with multiple windows of each), Outlook, several instances of VS.NET, SQL Enterprise Manager, Trillian, and other programs, my computer is already pushing its memory limits. In the past, my machine would hum along nicely if I didn't actually bring the aggregators to focus - they're large memory requirements were happily paged to disk. But once I clicked on, say, SharpReader, I'd have the ol' five second wait as Windows brought in the megs of memory that had been offloaded to disk back into main memory.
Ideally, an RSS aggregator would be able to keep pace with Outlook's memory requirements. Granted, these RSS aggregators are managed code and not fine tuned to reduce memory consumption, but still, Outlook is holding several thousand email messages, has Calendar features, uses numerous plugins like Spambayes, and still manages to keep itself around ~50 MB.
Let me close with saying that I do appreciate Luke and Dare's efforts - I'm not bashing them or their work, just providing constructive criticism.