Cairo 1.10.x wastes a lot of ram compared with cairo 1.8.x

[ercoppa]

Hi, I already try to discuss this in the italian section. I have a system partially in testing (most are desktop stuff), with:
- openrc 0.8
- gnome 2.32
- xorg 1.9.4
- nvidia-drivers 270.18
- my emerge --info here

Ask me if you need more details. I (and other people, see italian thread) notice that my system (in pariticular GNOME/GTK app/stuff) with cairo 1.10.x use a lot more ram than with cairo 1.8.x (totally maybe a difference of 100/150mb). Every component of GNOME use more ram (in some cases +10mb each)

Someone here, notice the same behaviour? Have you some idea about this problem or how to investigate it?

Greets, ercoppa.

P.s. sorry for my bad english

[BradN]

If you have the skill to do it, the most helpful way (to the developers) to tackle a problem like this is by accessing their svn server and doing a bisection test to find what change they made actually caused the memory usage difference.

A bisection test involves compiling and testing several versions of cairo (with various amounts of changes from the last known working to first known failed versions) and after testing ~10 different versions, it can narrow down to the exact patch applied against the source code that starts to cause problems. The SVN system is what does the work in picking what versions of the files to give you to test, and then tell it if that version worked or not.

But this is made difficult for a few reasons: Installing a system library like this could make it difficult to use your system if it messes up, and you will have to figure out how to manually install the package using the same settings as portage or things probably won't work right. And... downgrading system libraries might require you rebuilding programs against them, so a process like this could take a lot of time if you're not familiar with the right way to do it.

If any cairo developers or someone with the specific know-how reads this, maybe you can help track this problem down.

I think the best bet might be to make a bug report otherwise - just make sure that changing the cairo version is all it takes to cause or fix the problem! Developers hate chasing bugs between projects...