Sorry to forward a few of these to the inkscape-devel list, but I think its an interesting issue for us to deal with, especially as so many open mobile/ubiquitous devices are on the horizon, plus, it helps us track down memory leaks, etc.

Mental, this seems like it might interest you a bit? Also, could some others comment.

What are the top five ways we can practically lower these memory requirements?

Jon

-------- Forwarded Message --------

From: James Cameron <quozl@...1662...> To: Joshua N Pritikin <jpritikin@...237...> Cc: devel@...1312... <devel@...1312...>, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> Subject: Re: Inkscape and OLPC Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:25:35 +1100

On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 09:55:25PM +0530, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

...

Isn't inkscape still a memory pig?

inkscape 0.44.1-1 in my tests has 56Mb peak virtual size on startup, and 76Mb after loading the basic tutorial page. This would be an appreciable proportion of the currently planned 128Mb on the platform.

On startup (not on a B-test-1)

VmPeak: 56068 kB VmSize: 56068 kB VmLck: 0 kB VmHWM: 45420 kB VmRSS: 45420 kB VmData: 30068 kB VmStk: 84 kB VmExe: 4880 kB VmLib: 17408 kB VmPTE: 64 kB

After loading basic tutorial page (not on a B-test-1)

VmPeak: 73676 kB VmSize: 73676 kB VmLck: 0 kB VmHWM: 60868 kB VmRSS: 60868 kB VmData: 46116 kB VmStk: 84 kB VmExe: 4880 kB VmLib: 17480 kB VmPTE: 80 kB

...

Can inkscape be tuned to not allocate absurd amounts of memory?

It doesn't seem absurd given the functionality, but I imagine there might be opportunities to trim. The inkscape developers may know more.

...

I invested in a 512M RAM upgrade just so I could run inkscape on moderately complex drawings.

That seems excessive, and doesn't match my brief measurements. Were you running other applications at the time? I've assumed the basic tutorial is moderately complex. I don't know how this would compare to the drawings used by the target market of 5 to 9 year olds.