[Rule-list] Font server, and tips to reduce RAM needs

[Bill Crawford]

On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Marco Fioretti wrote:

> In the meantime, I would like to invite you, and everybody else of
> course, to share as many "obscure" RAM saving tips as possible (I
> refer to things like "because I set the scrollback size high": I would
> have never thought of that..)

 The scrollback thing I only really twigged to when I started reading
the xterm source code (it stores the stuff in a big array, and stores
attributes like colour and underline/bold too).  Plus I find that I
can speed up "rpm -Fvh *" by closing windows and giving rpm more RAM
to play with.

> Another area interesting me is the font server. I know that other
> distributions (slackware?) just don't use it, at least as stand-alone
> workstations. Can we port RH to do the same? How?

 Just don't start the font server, and change the XF86Config file to
list the font paths directly instead of the "unix/:7100" entry.

 Please note that this might not actually be much of a benefit though.
If you make the X server do all the font loading and rasterising, you
lose several benefits of the separate font server process -

 · cached font data survives when X is restarted, which saves a lot
  of disk- and number-crunching whenever you first use a font;
 · if there is a bug in rendering code (happened not so long ago) and
  it segfaults, having it in a separate process gives you a chance to
  close windows and save work rather than have the X server disappear
  from underneath you.  If you're lucky you can restart xfs and have
  a chance to carry on working.  This is a serious advantage to xfs.
 · less serious - you can upgrade xfs without restarting X ;o)

 I'm thinking more of limiting the number of different fonts loaded,
possibly by restricting the number installed.  In fact (despite my
earlier comment) a (small) selection of TrueType fonts might be a
winner here, because they

 · carry multiple encodings within the same file
 · only require loading one set of data to generate multiple sizes
 · do genuinely look better in many cases (not all).

 I'm not any kind of expert on this though, so actually measuring the
memory usage of xfs when using a variety of fonts is the only was to
get meaningful results.  I'll try it if I remember (not my strongest
point, I really *need* TODO lists :o)



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