Re: [Nano-devel] [RFC] vertical scroll arrows

[Brand Huntsman]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2018 19:48:06 +0100
Benno Schulenberg <address@hidden> wrote:

> Op 13-03-18 om 03:22 schreef Brand Huntsman:
> > One slight issue I just discovered with arrows is that
> > rxvt-unicode's RSS jumps by 15meg per instance, but available
> > memory only decreases by 5meg per instance, so 10meg is shared.
> > Base RSS is 7meg, so it doubles the size of each instance, which
> > adds up when one has 60 instances.  
> 
> You're saying that urxvt normally takes up 7 MB, and as soon as those
> Unicode arrows are displayed it takes up 15 MB?  Weird.  Xfce terminal
> here uses something like 37 MB at startup, and each new instance or
> new tab costs somewhere between 0 and 200 KB.  (Closing tabs or
> instances doesn't free any memory, it seems.)

First instant goes from 7 MB to 22 MB (15 MB more than it would without 
arrows), each additional instance shows 22 MB but only decreases free memory by 
12 MB (5 MB more than it would without arrows). I use urxvt because it has a 
smaller footprint than other terminals (like nano vs other editors). It has a 
server/client mode similar to what you describe with xfce terminal, but if any 
instance were to crash, they would all die.

Greek and various math symbols only increase urxvt from 7 to 10 MB. So even 
someone using normal unicode text might see an increase with the arrows.

I can patch out the arrows if I decide I'd rather have an extra 300 MB of 
memory. But anyone else using a small terminal would have to live with the 
larger size. Any of them who opens nano's help will already see increased urxvt 
usage until they close that terminal.