Comment 19 for bug 132612

In regards to Jesse's comment: I tested a few files on my computer and noticed the same sort of pattern using Gutsy. If I use a PDF that has embedded fonts, Evince works fine; a 7 MB PDF uses 20-40 MB of RAM as I scroll many times throughout the document, depending mostly on when figures are loaded in memory. This is still much higher than xpdf, but Evince is also much faster, so that's fine. If I open pdf files that are scanned, the problem is much worse: a 10 MB file starts at a minimum of 50 MB and spikes to 100 MB as a I scroll a little. Moreover, as I scroll many times throughout the document, the memory use starts to creep up, and I kill evince and reload when it reaches ~700 MB (which required scrolling between two distant (100 pages apart) points maybe 50 times). I keep a memory System Monitor on my panel and close Evince before it starts to page too badly, so I've not noticed the lockups others have reported.

This was not a problem in Feisty - the memory usage on similar files was in the same initial range, but this gradual creep to fill all available RAM did not occur. As a great many pdfs do not have properly embedded fonts and I regularly scroll multiple times through files, this is a major problem. I'd like to find a solution other than installing Acrobat Reader. (kripkenstein: unfortunately I'm only using my primary machine at the moment, so don't want to test your patch in the event of a major side effect.) Keeping multiple copies of Evince running on the same file solves the memory creep problem, but if I need more than 3-4 copies open at once to view different locations, then the total memory usage is still very high.

For what it's worth, I'm using the open source ati driver on a fresh Gutsy install with 1 GB RAM and same size swap.