Re: Low memory hacks

["Simos Xenitellis" <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Nikolay V. Shmyrev <nshmyrev yandex ru> wrote:
> В Птн, 29/02/2008 в 13:32 +0000, Brian Nitz пишет:
>
> > Kalle Vahlman wrote:
>  > > 2008/2/29, Nickolay V. Shmyrev <nshmyrev yandex ru>:
>  > >
>  > >>  Heh, I also would like to delete all .po files if only I knew how to
>  > >>  keep translations :)
>  > >>
>  > >
>  > > Deleting .po:s would be futile as those are just the sources from
>  > > which the actual (binary) files loaded are compiled ;)
>  > >
>  > I agree that deleting the .po files probably won't impact your physical
>  > memory footpring.
>  > > Even so, you only have the translations of your current locale loaded
>  > > into RAM so by deleting all the others you only save disk space. AFAIK
>  > > that should be safe to do though.
>  > >
>
>  Ups, sorry, of course I meant .mo files here. Unlocalized application
>  should be a bit faster for sure, the problem is to keep the balance
>  between localization and memory/speed. For example I don't need gconf
>  translations at all.
<snip>

Some messages do not get translated, so you see in the translations
files things like

msgid "DEFAULT"
msgstr "DEFAULT"

This is convenient, because in the statistics you can see the app
fully translated.

This also means that the MO file will still have an entry for these
two. Going through the MO files and removing these few occurrences
will free a bit of disk space, but also memory.
For some locales such as en_GB, this can account to about 14MB of MO
files while the real space should be close to 2MB.
This issue has been fixed in Ubuntu 8.04, though I believe each distro
has to reinvent the wheel.

Simos