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

[Oscar Fuentes]

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





--- Comment #11 from Oscar Fuentes <ofv wanadoo es>  2009-05-25 00:49:53 ---
(In reply to comment #10)
> No arguing at all, if we free the pixmaps and that memory is not freed, it's
> not *our* bug, so put the strain on people causing the problem, not on us.

OSes, libraries, services, all have bugs. If a bug on a third-party piece of
software is causing problems to the users of my application, and I cannot
directly fix it, I'm interested on implementing a workaround. Not doing so is
bad for my users.

OTOH, putting hundreds of megabytes of pixmaps on the X server looks like
abusing it. We can say that okular is the most memory hungry document viewer
out there (at least on Normal memory setting). The fact that the memory is used
by the X server is irrelevant: you can cause a huge memory consumption by just
advancing page by page on a large document. It's true that the X server may not
return the memory to the OS, but it's true too that at some point an instance
of okular may be using more than 500 MB of memory (I've seen this). This is not
right by any means. Hence my request for setting the Low memory setting as the
default one, or throwing out the pixmap usage.

> Of course your experience of using "remote X sessions over slow wifi networks."
> is not comparable at all with people running a local X server, for those people
> using pixmaps is visibly faster. The fact is that they are two totally
> different use cases and probably one can't do a program that will make both
> kind of users happy,

I'm "both kind of users". I'm trying to say that, right now, I've not found a
circunstance where okular is faster than other document viewers. Faster enough
to notice so that it makes a difference when looking at the document, not when
just seeing how the screen flashes while the pages change.

> people running local X servers want eye candy, speed at
> all costs, etc. People running remote/shared X servers want the less use of
> resources possible.

> I don't really see us changing this as it works fine for most of our users
> (you'll agree that people using "remote X sessions over slow wifi networks." is
> not a majority)

Most of my okular usage is on a local machine, so there is no need to paint me
as a corner case. OTOH, I recall that on irc you precisely explained that
pixmaps are useful for limiting bandwith usage, as once a page is on the X
server, viewing it again would not cause an image transfer. So now pixmaps are
intended for fast local viewing? Well, maybe you can point me to a document
which display is annoyingly slow on xpdf or evince and "fast enough" on okular
thanks to the pixmap trick on okular.

> but i am not sure if *i* (not the okular maintainer) would
> opose to a clean patch implementing non pixmap usage

Last time I offered to create such patch the maintainer answered with a
resounding NO.

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