Question about considerable memory usage

[Karmak23]

On a machine with [fixed] 4Gb of RAM, i’m looking for a balance between comfort-features and low memory usage. I landed using swww to cycle wallpapers without the gray screen of swaybg. I use swww img … with simple transition, and only fixed images (jpeg, pngs or webp).

I noticed that swww-daemon uses > 90MB of RAM even when not doing anything. I find this quite big, for just displaying a fixed image on one monitor @1920x1200px.

I understand that any animation must be precomputed and stored before beiing displayed, but could it be the daemon does not release the transitional frames after having switched to the fixed display of wallpaper ?

[LGFae]

This is a known problem, see #28 for details. We do release the frames, but there is no way of guaranteeing the OS will reclaim the memory.

I moved all of the reading the image code to the client in order to mitigate this, which seems to have cut overall memory usage by half.

I am currently planning on also moving all the animation and transition effects to the client. Then, the daemon would only have to worry about displaying images. It should reduce the memory footprint even further, but it is quite annoying to do. Also, it will require some testing to ensure we don't lose too much performance, since we will be sending a lot of information through the socket.

I thought about moving instead to a shared memory approach, which should be significantly faster, but I haven't tested it yet.

[LGFae]

Hello, @Karmak23. The current master should have improved considerably in terms of memory usage. When you have the time, could you check to see if it helps you?