[tex-live] TeX Live 2008: nasty pdf(la)tex bug on Solaris SPARC with ZFS

[Jonathan Kew]

On 13 Sep 2008, at 4:50 PM, Vladimir Volovich wrote:

> "JK" == Jonathan Kew writes:
>
>>> as i wrote in another email: just running "pdftex -ini \\relax"
>>> and looking at the process memory usage, i see it uses 6864 Kb of
>>> resident memory (and 73m VIRT) on my linux box.
>>>
>>> but for "xetex -ini \\relax", i see:
>>>
>>> TL2008: 128m RES, 239m VIRT TL2007: 14m RES, 95m VIRT
>>>
>>> why did xetex's memory usage so much increased compared to TL2007?
>>> (14 MB => 128 MB just for inixetex)
>
> JK> Mainly because of much bigger settings in texmf.cnf, I expect;
> JK> things like main_memory, font_mem_size, max_strings, trie_size,
> JK> etc have been vastly increased.
>
> note that "pdftex -ini", using the same texmf.cnf, still uses less  
> than 7MB
> of resident memory, compared to 128 MB used by xetex.
>
> i'd imagine it could be because of unicode initialization for
> characters (lccode, uccode, etc). did things change in this area since
> 2007? i.e. is xetex now using more memory to store unicode character
> properties than in 2007?

Yes, that's true, this changed between the TL2007 and TL2008 versions  
-- there are a number of tables that used to support only the Basic  
Multilingual Plane of Unicode, but have now been extended to cover the  
full Unicode space of U+0000..10FFFF. I was forgetting that the TL2007  
version predated this.

We could reduce this RAM footprint if it's a problem, but at the cost  
of slightly more complex code; it doesn't seem to have been a problem  
for users, though, so I've generally left things in their simplest form.

JK