Re: [Gimp-developer] Is there any way to free Gimp memory and avoid restarting it?

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, 2019-02-06 at 18:23 +0100, Peter Suetterlin wrote:
> By design allocators tend
> > to
> > keep freed memory around for reuse in future allocation calls,
>
> But this is not very social to other programs running on the same
> machine, is
> it?  I have noticed this behavior of GIMP myself before, and also
> thought this is not how it should be...

It’s the default behaviour for almost all programs. On Linux systems
you may be able to set M_TRIM_THRESHOLD_ to return memory to the
operating system in some circumstances, and also MALLOC_MMAP_THRESHOLD_
to make malloc() allocate memory in a way that gets reused more easily.
See the man page for mallopt.

On Unix systems (including Linux and Mac OS X) this behaviour is not
especially unfriendly: the unused space isn’t necessarily kept in main
memory.

Liam


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