I love racket, but DrRacket is just too slow and memory heavy for my machines.
My most powerful personal computer being a laptop with an 1.8GHz i5, and 4GB of ram. Yeah, that's very modest by 2014 standards, but I really think that it should be able to handle DrRacket better than it does. As it is, it is just too slow for me to put up with. I think that something that at least somewhat targets the education niche should be able to perform well on old hardware (the type of machine you might typically find in a university computer lab).
I have an even wimpier computer (2GB ram, 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo). The start up time is large, and it will happily use a couple of hundred megs of RAM, but I never felt that it was too slow. Maybe I'm using an old version (5.1), but I doubt it's gotten much worse lately.
I had racket 5 running fine on an atom based eee pc. The most important thing is to turn off unused 'tools'. you can also restrict memory use by DrRacket. These days Minimal Racket does all the for you.
My most powerful personal computer being a laptop with an 1.8GHz i5, and 4GB of ram. Yeah, that's very modest by 2014 standards, but I really think that it should be able to handle DrRacket better than it does. As it is, it is just too slow for me to put up with. I think that something that at least somewhat targets the education niche should be able to perform well on old hardware (the type of machine you might typically find in a university computer lab).