21 Oct 2005 freetype   » (Master)

FreeType

I'm still trying to get rid of big memory eaters in FreeType. I have found the following offenders to date:

  • the LZW decompressor, used to support pcf.Z and bdf.Z font files on legacy systems (i.e. SunOS) allocates a 400 KB memory block before reading anything from a file.

  • the PCF driver copies large portions of font files into memory, when it should really re-load them on demand.

  • the BDF driver allocates a 64 Kb heap block before reading anything. It also duplicates a lot of things in memory when it should re-read them from the file.

I've started working on the first one. It seems the code we use came from the BSD "uncompress" program. Its source code is cryptic, suffers from bad design and slow read performance. I rewrote it in a few hours into something much more elegant. Try to compare this and this.

The good news is that testing with timR24.pcf.Z shows that opening is now 27% faster, glyph loading is now 63% faster, and that the new code saves 330KB of heap memory with this font. not bad for such a small change :-)

However, this is for a deprecated format that nearly nobody uses. I'll probably work on the PCF reader later. Its source code comes from the XFree86 distribution, and probably needs a good rewrite as well.

I'm also wondering if there isn't a way to optimize the zlib source code used for .gz support. Last time I checked, it was horrible as well, but it seems they've done very good thing for version 1.2.

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