[Gimp-developer] 2.3 Memory usage and leaks

[Sven Neumann]

Hi,

On Fri, 2007-07-13 at 15:47 -0700, Akkana Peck wrote:

> I played around with gmemusage to get a feel for what was going
> on. GIMP 2.3 uses between 33.9 and 35.0 Mb on startup (no images
> loaded, and I don't know why it isn't always the same). For
> comparison, 2.2.13 uses about 13.9 Mb at startup, so it's increased
> by a factor of about 2.5 just for the base app, before images.

What does gmemusage display? Does it only look at malloc'ed pages or
does it also take code size into account?

> Each time I load an image then close the image window without doing
> anything, gimp grows by some variable amount, ranging from half a
> Mb to 2Mb (perhaps related to the size of the image). If I do
> operations on the image before closing it, these cause it to grow
> more: doing a crop and a scale almost always makes it grow 2Mb
> even with a relatively small image.

That's not a useful measure as it doesn't take memory pools into
account. glibc has memory pools and gimp 2.3 also makes heavy use of
GSlice.

> So my questions are:
> 
> - Is the growth that comes from loading an image, doing operations
>   on it then closing the window expected? What is this memory being
>   used for?

At least to some extend this is expected. But it shouldn't grow with
each image.

> - Is anyone concerned about gimp's minimal profile having risen from
>   14M to 35M?

I would definitely be concerned but since I don't know what gmemusage
does and since I don't know anything about the differences between your
gimp 2.2 and gimp 2.3 installation, there's not much we can do.

If you suspect a memory leak, you should use valgrind to verify that.
And you should run gimp with G_SLICE=always-malloc when doing that.


Sven