Sun Java JRE Bloat

Well, it took Microsoft long enough to finally scale down Internet Explorer's ridiculously bloated cache allocation; Internet Explorer 7 follows other browsers in sizing this to 50M, irrespective of hard drive volume size, and it may complain that the present cache size is too large (e.g. if it was set so via user).

However, what Microsoft has finally learned, Sun is still getting wrong. After installing the new Sun Java JRE 1.6, I saw a Java SysTray icon, and poked around; there's a slider for temporary file cache to be allocated to Java (separate from browser caches) and the duhfault is 1G! Needless to say, that got scaled back to 20M pretty quickly.

So, there's a new bloat factor to remember when folks run out of space on C:, over and above the bloat of multiple Sun Java JREs, as discussed earlier in this blog. At least new JREs no longer pass control to older (exploitable) ones when requested to do so by Java malware (sorry, "valued Java applets"); still, at 100M+ a pop, old JREs aren't too cheap.