Re: Excessive memory usage

[Jeff Kingston]

Lout uses a lot of memory, for sure.  It reclaims the memory devoted
to some part of the document when it prints that part.  It basically
prints the document one page at a time unless there is some reason
to hold a page back.

Are your several smaller tables separated by something like @LP or @DP?
(Or in terms of Lout's primitives, a // operator)?  If they are separated
by / they will all be held and all printed together.  Lout also reads
input in chunks from one @LP or @DP or // etc. to the next.

The only other thing I can suggest (and I've done it myself, not because
tables take a lot of memory, but because they're slow as well) is to
abandon @Tbl and generate simpler Lout, such as

2c @Wide { hello world } | 3c @Wide { second column }
//0.5c
2c @Wide { hello again } | 3c @Wide { second column }

and so on.  You need to know the column widths to do this, and you
lose a lot of @Tbl's convenience features, but it runs much faster
and uses a lot less memory and is well suited to program-generated Lout.

Jeff Kingston


On 10 Apr 2002 14:56:01 +0200, Milan Zamazal wrote:
  > 
  > I try to use Lout for print-formatting database tables in some
  > application.  I'm faced with a problem of an excessive memory usage of
  > Lout, unacceptable at a common workstation (> 100 MB).  I can understand
  > Lout takes a lot (even extremely much, as I've experienced) of memory
  > when formatting a huge table.  The basic problem is that when I split
  > the big table into several smaller ones, Lout's memory consumption is
  > reduced, but still about directly proportional to the size of the
  > *whole* data.
  > 
  > I'd like to know whether there is a way to make the memory usage less
  > dependent on the size of the data.
  > 
  > ...
  > 
  > Can I do something about it?  I use Debian GNU/Linux if it matters.
  > 
  > Thanks for any advice.
  > 
  > Milan Zamazal