[Scribus] Minimum practical memory size

[Gregory Pittman]

Calum Polwart wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-01-29 at 23:24 +0100, Craig Bradney wrote:
>> On Sunday 29 January 2006 23:17, John R. Culleton wrote:
>> > I am working in Scribus on a Linux Slack 10.2 system with 256MB
>> > of memory. I seem to be having memory problems. I have plenty  of
>> > swap space. What is the practical minimum memory for Scribus
>> > 1.3.2?
>>
>> How was your Scribus built?
>>
>> Your build ID in Help About will show something like:
>> C-C-T-F-A or perhaps that A will be a C. Is your Scribus really 1.3.2 or have 
>> you built from CVS? The reason I say this is that the cairo build of 1.3.2 or 
>> before had a memory leak. Built against libart, or 1.3.3cvs, there is no 
>> issue.
>>
>> Other than that, 256-512 would be minimums depending on the rest of the system 
>> installed and running.
>>
>>     
> I'm running Fedora Core 3 with Scribus 1.3.2cvs, with a 2200MHz AMD XP 
> Processor and 256Mb Ram and would say that it can also grind to a halt 
> quite frequently (Final PDF size is about 50Mb to give idea of size).  
> It works - its just slow.. Sometimes painfully slow.  My swap space is 
> fairly small (1-2Gb) - "she" keeps filling the temp space with music 
> and video downloads!.
You will find that the final PDF size is not such a good indicator of 
the space Scribus needs, especially if there are images.
With 256MB of RAM, your system is using (virtually) all of that all the 
time; when you start up Scribus some things are taken out of RAM to make 
room, then as you begin to use resources you have to use swap. I don't 
think that /tmp is used by Scribus for storing anything about your work.
If you have /var on its own partition, make sure it has plenty of space 
to work with. I have a laptop with FC4 and a rather limited /var, so I 
learned why I needed to do a 'yum clean packages' fairly frequently.

Greg