Re: [Plplot-devel] Re: New way of getting device info from dyndrivers

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, Maurice LeBrun wrote:

> Alan W. Irwin writes:
>  > Summary: the new code loops over every device so will trigger the
>  > complete collection of valgrind errors for all devices (just xwin in this
>  > case) while the old code just looked at the user-specified device so gets no
>  > valgrind errors (except when the user specified xwin).
>
> I've not been following the discussion very closely, but does this mean that
> the code currently loads all dynamic drivers at startup time?  If true, this
> seems against the spirit of dynamic drivers, and adds unnecessarily to the
> memory used by the application.

Good question.....

Here is my understanding of our current situation. Rafael's code is designed
on startup to momentarily load each driver to collect and store required
information about it (as opposed to storing the required information in
drivers/drivers.db).  And Joao did some timing to show this loading of all
drivers was very fast. However, at the moment "momentarily" is until exit
from PLplot and consequently PLplot uses more memory then it should because
of a bug in libltdl that doesn't allow unloading.  But once that bug is fixed
it is only a matter of uncommenting one line in plcore.c to get a leaner,
meaner PLplot.

Alan

__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

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