It might seem like a trivial point: reducing the memory footprint of your veterinary practice management application. Does it really matter? You have to buy a big server and they all come with loads of RAM today, so why worry about your software keeping its memory footprint lean?
The answer may surprise you. But first off, low memory footprints are simple a positive sign of good system design. Using unnecessarily large amounts of memory for anything other than a cache indicates bloat and bloat is a red flag for bugs, performance issues, and costly maintenance problems. Lean code leads to faster applications that use fewer resources to do more work. Bloated software is like a cat that is overweight - it makes the risks of heart disease and other ailments more likely and makes the cat require more work to maintain. Software health matters to your business.
Looking at the market leading application of the 2010s, at idle on an fully updated system with no active users the system requires more then 4200MB of memory to function with that number increasing with users being on the system and installation recommendations are usually pushing for 20GB (that’s 20,000MB) or more for a standard deployment. Those are some big numbers for a pretty small application. By contrast, Vetastic (along with the entire operating system that it runs on) can not just idle at 117MB, but can easily service active users! That’s less than 3% of the memory resources needed for the competition.
Using that small amount of memory is a great indicator that the underlying components are lean, efficient, and modern. And it has direct impact to your business: it means that you can buy smaller, less expensive hardware and keep it running perfectly well for longer. What might sound like a trivial “under the hood” aspect of good software design has a direct correlation to your pocketbook long term.