[Okular-devel] [Bug 177213] High X server memory consumption

[Oscar Fuentes]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177213





--- Comment #9 from Oscar Fuentes <ofv wanadoo es>  2009-05-24 22:11:38 ---
(In reply to comment #8)
> (In reply to comment #7)
> >    - The X server memory is NOT consistently freed when okular exits.
> 
> This is an Xorg bug.

It is a QoI (qualitiy of implementation) issue on the X server, not necessarily
a bug.

Nevertheless, it is affecting okular users. Other pdf/djvu viewers are not
affected by this problem. This diminishes the value of okular compared against
those other viewers.

The problem is very serious when you are using okular on a remote X server with
low memory while okular runs on a machine with lots of RAM: my case when
reading docs on a 1 GB X server with okular running on a 8 MB machine.
Eventually, the X server starts swapping and becomes very slow.

Which lead us to the crux of the issue: okular developers explained to me that
the agressive usage of X server pixmaps is geared towards fast perfomance
showing pages. After months using okular with the Low memory setting, I've
never experienced slowness. Actually, either with the Low memory setting or
with the Normal setting it feels as fast as xpdf, for instance, which does not
use the pixmap trick at all. This experience includes remote X sessions over
slow wifi networks.

So, unless someone can justify the superiority of the pixmap approach on terms
of improved reading experience (not just raw displayed-pages-per-minute, we are
talking about displaying a static image for reading) I humbly suggest to use
the Low memory setting as the default or, better, do not use the pixmap trick
at all.

The memory used by the X server grows with the Low memory setting too, although
much less than the Normal setting, where is no rare to see the X server's
memory reaching gigabyte levels after some days of light usage. You can argue
that it is an Xorg problem (it really is an Xorg problem that you are storing 1
GB of pixmaps on the X server?) but okular users will perceive it as a okular
problem.

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