[Amsn-devel] Fighting the memory footpring of amsn

[Ivan H. <ihe...@ki...>]

Hello!

I have never developed with tcl/tk, but have been using amsn and making  
customizations to the code because it's simply the only serious choice 
for using msn on linux. The problem i'm looking is that the memory 
footprint tends to be too big. it sometimes come near to 120mb of ram. 
it's a lot, and i'm not talking about virtual memory. 120mb allocated... 
on the physical ram.

So i have started to plug off plugins, and so, and looking where does it 
consumes so much memory.

Finally i have found a way to keep it less than 40mb, but it means 
saying goodbye to almost every plugin i use, and mutilating the theme.

Some things really waste memry. For example, animated gif's. Replacing 
the loganim.gif that comes with the new theme for the login with a 
simple animated gif with 4kb saves almos 8mb of ram.

That means, that there should be a lot of little things to improve. Amsn 
needs a tool to see how much memory each loaded image wastes, and the 
same for plugin, so one can realize what is happening.

How could that be done on tcl? i have tried some code on the skin.tcl like:

                set imagen [image create photo ${naming}_${pixmap_name} 
-file [::skin::GetSkinFile ${location} [set 
${location}_names($pixmap_name)] \
                                        "" [set 
${location}_fblocation($pixmap_name)]] -format cximage]
                set imagen_string [$imagen data -format cximage]
                puts "Pixmap size $res = [string length $imagen_string] "

But was not much useful. I think that developers would find a way to do 
this much more easy.

Well... that's all.
Thanks for the time and i will try to be more helpful than simpy saying 
"amsn is getting fat" !

Ivan