thread stack size

["Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak" <mjc avtechpulse com>]

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out why gthumb uses so much memory, even when it is 
displaying an empty folder. I've figured out that it is launching 6-8 
threads, which each consume 10 MB each of "writeable/private" memory. 
pmap -d shows:

mapped: 141352K    writeable/private: 76352K    shared: 516K

If I patch the code to use 64k stack size for new threads, like this:

- priv->thread = g_thread_create (load_image_thread, il, TRUE, NULL);
+ priv->thread = g_thread_create_full (load_image_thread, il, 65536, 
TRUE, FALSE, G_THREAD_PRIORITY_NORMAL, NULL);

memory consumption drops dramatically (and the program still works):

mapped: 91284K    writeable/private: 25872K    shared: 516K

(There are still 2-3 10MB stacks that I don't understand fully yet).

The gnome api says "Only use g_thread_create_full() if you really can't 
use g_thread_create() instead". Why not? Are there any real downsides here?


- Mike