On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 03:45:42PM -0300, Ezequias Rodrigues da Rocha wrote:

So there isn't other option ? Just by more 256Mb memory ?

Buying more memory is probably the best solution, if your system will support more.

I don't think Corel Draw have this need of memory. I know inkscape is just a boy next CorelDraw isn't ?

The need for the memory is due to the way Inkscape _manages_ memory. This is so it has space for garbage collection, a huge undo buffer, and so forth. It is an optimization for people working on larger, more complex drawings rather than simple things. It would be nice if this were tunable but it wasn't implemented that way.

As you know, life usually involves making tradeoffs. For software, you often are faced with deciding between more powerful features and heavier memory/cpu usage. Often you can optimize to do the same thing with less memory and cpu, but optimization work can be very hard and time consuming, which means sacrificing feature and bug fixing work for small improvements.

As an example, consider localization. As you know, Inkscape has worked very very hard over the past year to add better support for other languages, to enable speakers of non-English languages to be able to use Inkscape. This requires changing internal variable types from simple char's to unicode variables; these take up several times the memory because they are representing a wider variety of character types. A char takes up 1 byte, whereas a unicode (UTF-8) character uses up to 4 bytes each. Localization is not the only cause in the need for large amounts of memory, but it is one example to show where the memory is being used. As I think you would agree, for an open source project like Inkscape it is important that we support speakers of other languages; this is an important feature and well worth it's memory tradeoff.

It's possible that with some tricks we could find ways to achieve this without such heavy memory use. However, these days a system with only 256M memory is going to be pretty limited even aside from Inkscape. Running KDE or Gnome on Linux also is very poor at less than 512M. I imagine Windows XP is similarly demanding of memory.

I do not accept Inkscape need more than 256Mb memory just to draw easy drawings.

Then here are several things you can do.

First, look into the memory usage in the code. For example, perhaps you could reduce the number of steps of undo, or change the settings in the memory manager to be a bit more tight with its usage. One of the developers might be willing to give you pointer to where these are defined in the codebase.

Second, if you can code, you should add a commandline option to cause inkscape to run in a memory-lite fashion, using those tunings.

Third, it would be useful to identify where the memory is being used, and by how much. This would be useful info for future developers to identify where optimization would be most fruitful.

If you do not code or don't wish to help improve Inkscape's memory tuning capabilities, then perhaps you can find another program that works better on your system. As I mentioned, maybe an older version of Inkscape would be better. There are also other drawing apps that may have lighter memory usage but still have the features you need.

Bryce