strange memory usage on Windows

[David Mathog]

The memory usage reported by Windows Task Manager for Inkscape is bizarre. (XP 32 bit system) This seems to be entirely a Windows phenomenon, because the same version (r11598 with my EMF patches) on Linux stays pretty steady at: virt=152M, res=62M, Shar=22M). All versions back to 0.48.2 (and probably further back than that) do this.

Here is how to demonstrate the problem:

Memory used (M) following action
56.952 Start program (all panes closed, just the empty drawing area)
1.176 Minimize window (to taskbar)
8.720 Reopen window
+(varies) wave the mouse around in the drawing pane, it does not seem to matter
  if it is within the page boundaries or outside of them. Whenever the mouse stops moving, the memory increments.
  No clicking is involved, just moving the pointer around. In a minute I could easily raise the memory
 total by another 6M. The usage only goes up, it was not observed decreasing ever.
2.664 Minimize the window (to taskbar). Waving the mouse over the window icon on the task bar does not change
  the memory usage. (The exact value of memory varies some here in different tests.)
8.860 Reopen window. There is no reason this shouldn't be 8.720 - no change was made to either the window
  or the document!
40.960 open subsup.svg (or probably any other test file).
1.176 Minimize window (to taskbar)
14.628 Reopen window (26M smaller than before, exact same window displayed)
+(varies) Move mouse around in drawing space.
+0 click on underlying object after move (carefully, with no accompanying move)
+(varies) Move mouse around over any part of Inkscape window, outside of drawing area

Key problems:

1. Waving the mouse around causes the memory to continuously increment upwards. It never goes down until
the window is minimized, at which point all (?) of the accumulated memory is released.

2. Starting the program, or opening a new file, seems to use up 30-40M for no apparent reason. This memory is released
if the window is minimized and reopened.

Of these, 1 is the bigger problem. If there is no upper limit on the effect inkscape could end up being hundreds of megabytes larger in memory than it needs to be.

[Qantas94Heavy (qantas94heavy)]

Unfortunately can't reproduce this with Inkscape 1.0. If this is still an issue, please go to our new report tracker: https://inkscape.org/inbox

Closed by: https://gitlab.com/Qantas94Heavy