[comp.windows.x.motif] Widget creation: slower and slower

dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks) (07/25/90)

In article <394@echbull.bull.fr>, Francois.Laagel@ec.bull.fr writes:
> This experience showed a very strange phenomenon : the creation phase took
> more and more time (6 seconds for the 1st time, 13 seconds for the 2nd time
> then 18 seconds, finaly if took over a minute to create the form and its
> children for the tenth time). The times given here were measured using the
> libc clock() function.

Chances are this is related to the memory leak in the Intrinsics.
This leak in destroying widgets' accelerator tables, which has proven
rather intractable, is magnified by Motif's making significant use of
accelerators.

So it could be that, as malloc's arena grows and gets filled with
orphaned blocks, it causes lotsa thrashing.

The good news is that our engineers have a fix and are planning to fit
it into the R4 intrinsics in time for the Motif 1.1 release.  We'd
also like to apply the fix to 1.0.3, but I don't have technical
details yet.  Don Bennett, at Frame, has described a partial solution.

I'd like to say the workaround is "don't destroy/create; do
unmanage/manage".  However, several people have rather forcibly
persuaded me that is not a sensible restriction...
-- 
David Brooks				dbrooks@osf.org
Systems Engineering, OSF		uunet!osf.org!dbrooks