[Scribus] Import Pantone Colours

[Craig Ringer]

Patrick Ernst wrote:

> Hi Greg. EPS and PS files in most apps seem to suck up memory. The 
> Scribus version is 1.3.3.1 on Suse 10. I was concerned that after 
> closing the file that Scribus didn't free the RAM.

AFAIK it can't; that's a pretty fundamental issue with the way memory 
allocation in C/C++ programs is done. I've explained in detail on the 
list before, and the archives have that, so I won't repeat it here. 
"Heap fragmentation" should get you started.

There are ways to for an app to release RAM back to the OS, but they're 
rather convoluted, painful, and have their own problems, usually boiling 
down to the app essentially doing its own memory management 
implementation inside the OS's.

You will find that the system swaps out the "unused but not freed" RAM. 
This is one of the reasons why modern OSes perform better with swap, and 
use swap even when they have extremely minimal memory pressure. It's not 
ideal, but it's generally alright. It's much better not to require such 
huge amounts of RAM in the first place.

It *is* possible to allocate a large amount of RAM, use it, then free it 
back to the OS. It's just hard - you have to be very careful NEVER to 
let anything get allocated in the area above the large chunk that you 
won't have freed by the time you're done with the large chunk, otherwise 
you can't release any of that memory back to the OS. In a large app full 
of GUI code etc, that's unlikely to be practical to do reliably.

I could easily be wrong here, as I'm getting a bit rusty on the 
low-level details (too much Java at uni).

--
Craig Ringer