In the past, my method to measure peak memory usage was to boot a system, wait for it to become idle, run "free", run the program in question, then run "free" again. The difference is the memory usage. This method accounts for multi-process programs such as the LAMP stack, but it doesn't work as well for ephemeral command line utilities.

Today I ran across an easier way: Run the command line utility with /usr/bin/time -v. Example:

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Back in the day, my brother introduced me to goodreads.com and it was good. The site gradually became more and more Javascript-intense until I couldn't use it from my netbook. The mobile site worked for a while, but then it too became unusable on my netbook. The injustice of it all! It was all the excuse I needed for a new programming project.

I had recently finished a book Introduction to Object-oriented Programming by Timothy Budd [1], and was eager to apply it. I wrote an...