Re: [vile] memory usage

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2010, address@hidden wrote:

> I have plain text file of around 100meg (3.7 million lines) if I edit this
> file with vile I noticed vile's resident set size is about 311megs (virtual
> 448megs), which xvile I've seen it goes as high as 650megs and really start
> chewing into my swap area.
>
> I've tested with a few other editors (mainly vi variants) and they seem to
> require roughly half the memory as vile on these same large files.  I'm not
> complaining, I'm just curious as to why this might be the case and if there
> are any settings I should apply when working with these files to reduce the
> memory footprint.  I've already disabled highlighting.

The amount of memory is mostly in the file (with per-line overhead - 
something like 40 bytes iirc).  Besides highlighting, the visual-matches 
feature is a performance hit.  Both of those apply lots of markup to the 
file.

One of the things that I have in mind to work on (when 9.8's out) is
to improve performance of the highlighting by reducing the amount of the
file processed when highlighting it...

> I know these are large files and I don't usually need to edit them but
> sometimes its much easier to navigate large log files with an editor
> instead of 'more'.

( I do that too ;-)

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net