footprint
NounWordNet 3.0
Noun (3)
- a mark of a foot or shoe on a surface“the police made casts of the footprints in the soft earth outside the window”Synonyms: footmarkstep
- a trace suggesting that something was once present or felt or otherwise important“the footprints of an earlier civilization”
- the area taken up by some object“the computer had a desktop footprint of 10 by 16 inches”
Webster's Dictionary (GCIDE)
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
1.<jargon, hardware> The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware.
2.<jargon, storage> The amount of disk or RAM taken up by a program or file.
3.(IBM) The audit trail left by a crashed program (often "footprints").
See also toeprint. [Jargon File]
(1995-04-25)
The Jargon File
1.The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware.
2.[IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in plural, footprints). See also toeprint.
3.RAM footprint: The minimum amount of RAM which an OS or other program takes; this figure gives one an idea of how much will be left for other applications. How actively this RAM is used is another matter entirely. Recent tendencies to featuritis and software bloat can expand the RAM footprint of an OS to the point of making it nearly unusable in practice. [This problem is, thankfully, limited to operating systems so stupid that they don't do virtual memory -- ESR]