RE: [ft-devel] Regarding GTK/GNOME memory usage optimization

[Turner, David]

Hello everyone,

> 
> The newer Intel Extreme cards usually grab 32 MB of system memory,
> whereas a 4 MB ATI Rage mobility has it's own 4 MB of memory, and
> won't touch the system memory.  I don't know the specifics of how
> 'free' detects used memory, but since the difference seems to be
> almost exactly 32 MB, I'm betting your suspicion is right.
> 
It probably is the problem. I installed Ubuntu, and at the first gdm
greeting, which isn't something very complex. my X server already
uses 140 Mb of virtual memory, 130 of them being shared. Interestingly,
'free' tells me I'm using less memory. Same on Mandrake. There is nothing
in the BIOS, or even the Windows driver, to change the amount of "reserved"
or "shared" graphics memory. I won't try to understand what these numbers
mean at this point.

Extreme-ly sad, I would say... Let's consider this case closed now.


Here are a few additionnal interesting things regarding FT memory usage:

- the LZW stream implementation allocates a single 400 Kb chunk
  of memory at initialization (i.e. before reading anything).

  What this means is that if the 'bdf' or 'pcf' driver appears
  first in your module list (i.e. in include/freetype/config/ftmodule.h),
  opening any TrueType or Postscript font file will grab that much memory
  from the heap, even if it releases it immediately.

  A rewrite of the offending code is in progress.

- The Type 1 loader reads the whole content of the font file
  into the heap before testing the first bytes to check that
  it really is a Postscript font. Not too smart...

  Another fix in progress :-)


Best regards, and thanks for the help...


- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)


> matt
> 
> 
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