Memory requirements - suggestions welcomed

[Nikhil Nair <nn201@cus.cam.ac.uk>]

Hi all,

I'm putting together an uptodate gnuchess package (the current one is 
broken ...).  One thing I'm a bit concerned about is the amount of memory 
it uses - the program is optimised for speed, and normally uses about 
9Mb!  Running on a PC with 8Mb, that spells trouble - so much swapping 
that it is able to use about 2% CPU time even if there's nothing else 
much running.  Now, I can reduce the memory requirements to about 3Mb, 
and it still works, though it probably won't play quite so well on a 
machine with 16Mb+.

There's no run-time configuration file (though I have suggested it to the
authors), but you can alter this with command-line options, e.g.

gnuchess -C 18001 -T 150001 ... (default, 9Mb version), or
gnuchess -C 6001 -T 37501 (3Mb version).

So the question is, how much memory does the average Debian system have 
free to run something like this?  As I mentioned, it works very poorly if 
its swapped out (I do realise we can't guarantee it won't be ...).  How 
much memory should I make the default usage, and should I put a note 
about this in /usr/doc/gnuchess/?

Cheers,

Nikhil.