RE: [ft-devel] Regarding GTK/GNOME memory usage optimization

[Turner, David]

Hello everyone,

> The only place that Pango isn't using the public APIs is the much
> discussed OpenType code.
> 
Fine, I think I'll be able to provide you with a patch rather easily
next week then..

> Fontconfig does seem to be using some FreeType internal API for
> things like BDF files. I don't really know the details there.
> 
I'll have a look at fontconfig later. However, I don't expect typical
users to install BDF fonts. It's rather PCF, especially compressed
ones which are such a waste of resources when embedding the bitmaps
in a TrueType file provides both drastic performance, memory and
file size improvements.

By the way, where is the tool used to create these fonts. I believe
that Juliusz wrote it and that it's now part of the X.org distribution,
but I'd like to get a hand on its source code ?

> Thanks a lot for looking into the memory usage situation....
> I'd say in general FreeType right now is fairly low on my memory
> usage radar ... profiles I've looked at is that apps do tend to have 
> non-trivial amount of non-shared memory allocated by FreeType,
> but using 50 or 80k of memory for loading fonts doesn't seem
> excessive to me compared to how we are using memory elsewhere.
> 
> I haven't looked at the situation for CJK or all-Unicode fonts.
> It's possible that dynamic allocation from FreeType is more of
> a problem there.
>

I've nearly completed the optimization. The results are described
in my latest Advogato diary entry (dated March 2nd). Have a look
at:

   http://www.advogato.org/person/freetype/
 
I'd be interested if one of you had a clear way to measure the global
improvement on a typical Gnome or KDE desktop.

Apparently, FreeType 2.1.9 and before didn't excel with very large
fonts...


Best Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)


> Regards,
>                                       Owen
> 
> 
>