Quoting Ralf Stephan <ralf@...748...>:
Addendum: the amount of memory allocated and growing shown by top when I cycle through 'load keys.svg; New file; close keys.svg' is nearly the same which valgrind shows me on this block:
This should be an expected consequence of disabling garbage collection.
You will simply have to ignore leaks where you see an allocator taking Inkscape::GC::ScanPolicy or Inkscape::GC::CollectionPolicy in the call chain. It should be possible to write a suppression profile to do this.
Note that most Inkscape subsystems do not use the garbage-collected heap, so you can still get useful results for other memory.
A question: wouldn't a forced garbage collection at close time cure the situation, as most people have reported problems when closing/opening documents?
No (it's been tried). The leaks on document close are in manually managed memory.
-mental