Bug 17

Summary:	Fontconfig
Product:	fontconfig	Reporter:	Nick Torys <ntorys>
Component:	fc-cache	Assignee:	Keith Packard <keithp>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	high	CC:	ntorys
Version:	2.1
Hardware:	x86 (IA32)
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Nick Torys 2003-01-28 08:53:14 UTC

I can't provide details as I am not a software developer, but:
I have tested installation on Debian Sid, on 7 machines, and two of them failed
to install fontconfig. The interesting thing is that two workstations have
 exactly the same packages installed and yet one of them did not work.
 All three machines have the KDE 3.0.5a installed. Two machines have the same
 ASUS mother board and 500MB of DDR RAM.The difference is the speed of the CPU's
and the video cards.One has GeForce2 and the other GeForce4. The one with
 GeForce4 failed the installation. But both, failed previous version of
fontconfig. The machine that failed the installation, just sat at the creation
of the font-cache. I had to abort it's installation.
Now the interesting part, yesterday I tried to install Fontconfig on my notebook
PII-233MHz, 160 MBytes, KDE3.0.5a, and it failed three attempts. Everytime it
 run out of memory and the installer began to shut some of the running
 processes. It failed the same way when I restarted my notebook without
 the KDE running. Every time I got an error message telling me to look at
 the .log file, which was empty. The package was installed as far as the
 dselect was concerned, but KDE login screen never came up, it just sat at the
mouse ponter and the hour glass. Machine was still running, because I could
switch to other consoles to check memory usage with the free. Removal of the
font fontconfig fixed the problem.I noticed that font config is a real hog on
the memory, as the notebook had no memory left with fontconfig sort of
 installed and hanging at the KDE login prompt.
To the contrast machine less than 50 MBytes without the fontconfig while
 the KDE was running.
I transferred the system image from one machine to the other, and the
 workstations show 500MBytes used, with only 250MBytes available, while the
fontconfig is installed.

Regards,

Nick

Comment 1 Keith Packard 2003-01-28 10:42:10 UTC

I've had several reports of large memory usage when launching fontconfig
based apps when fc-cache hasn't been run.  Can you try (as root)
'fc-cache -f' and then attempt to run an app and see if this is the same
problem?

Comment 2 Dima Marchenko 2003-02-17 01:30:12 UTC

As Keith mentioned in private mail it is the problem with some versions of
FreeType, so I provide the version I use: 2.1.3. I debugged the stuff and
figured out that FT_New_Face() function in FreeType library (really it's the
problem with open_face() function there) sometimes allocates about 40k RAM even
if it didn't find the font needed. It contains the ugly gotos ( as fontconfig
does also ;) ) for error handling. Something like

if( FT_ALLOC( face, ... ) )
  goto Fail;
if( FT_New( internal ) )
  goto Fail;
...
face->internal = internal;
...
if( error )
  goto Fail;
...
Fail:
  if( error ) {
    clazz->done_face( face );
    FT_FREE( face->internal );
    FT_FREE( face );
  }
  return error;

Bruteforce hacking ( like if( internal ) FT_FREE( internal ); etc ) headed me to
segmentation fault. So I should hack it a little bit more. Anyway it's not
fontconfig problem & it can't be fixed from inside the library (I tried to
enforce FT_Done_Face() call from the fontconfig library but it didn't free the
memory).

Regards, Dima

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