I can't comment on the performance problems because i never had any here, but the quoted sentence just hit on my nerve:

ajcannon, i come from *way back*, wenn really BIG computers (no, not PCs - mainframes) had 1 MB of memory and I did program digital signal processors with some kilowords (1word=4bytes) of memory - i can tell you 512MB is an awful lot and you could store some telephone books simultaneously in such an amount of memory. Frankly, I'm not wondering why anyone could log on with 512MB, i wonder how this could be not enough.

What has gone wrong in the software industry?

bakunin