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Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

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Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#321
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then code was usually closely tied to the hardware with very little abstraction. Nowadays even if you write in a low level language it's not difficult to target a wide array of devices if you go through standard interfaces. Proprietary software is probably the main reason we haven't had a whole lot of diversity in ISAs over the past couple of decades (see: Itanium). It's no coincidence that ARM's mainstream expl…

Back then C was a high level language. Programmers regularly dropped down to assembly (or even raw machine bytes) when they needed the best performance. Now C is considered low level and compilers can optimize much better than you can in almost all cases so more programmers are only vaugly aware of assembly. Though you are correct, a lot of abstraction today makes things portable in ways that in the past they were no…

> Now C is considered low level and compilers can optimize much better than you can in almost all cases so more programmers are only vaugly aware of assembly.

This is not true, compilers don’t generate super-optimized asm output from C. It’s actually not that optimizable because eg the memory access is too low level so there are aliasing issues.

But optimizing doesn’t actually help most programs on modern CPUs so it’s not worth improving this.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See "there’s more columns than that". The single process "memory" column does match but AM doesn't show coalition (multiple process) memory totals, the compressed column is an estimate, footprint --vmObjectDirty also exists and is a valid way to look at things, etc.

Ah, I see what you mean now; yes, it's not reliable in the sense that there are ways to measure it that look a little harder. That being said, I'm not sure I'd classify it as "inaccurate"–it has, in my experience at least, been a fairly good first approximation of memory usage.

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Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#323
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling M1s with a decent amount of RAM would surely help too

Because 16GB is suddenly low? Until now most laptops sold everywhere, including high end models, where 16GB and below. 32/64 is a tiny niche (and special built to order option in most cases), even for video and music editing people. Sure, 32GB would be nice, but let's pretend this is some huge issue for but a small minority that runs several VMs simultaneously or such. Not to mention the M1 machines released thus far…

I realized that too much RAM leads to issues like this proliferating: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-jupyter/issues/4442

Oh, the app happens to use 5 instead of 1 background processes and nobody notices (using 50+ MB of RAM each, it's not nothing) and the bug just languishes.. :)

It adds up, and needs to be fixed.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#324
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers and other players will generally be fine, as they render the image progressively. However, editors /processing tools which attempt to load it as a series of frames or a video will usually break, as memory consumption explodes, unless they have a smart disk buffer system to handle it. I wouldn't be surprised if some poorly implemented players were built on top of abstraction layers that end up flattening the…

And this kids, is why we have key and delta frames. We should drop gif support.

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Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a 32gb overclocked hackintosh and my 8gb M1 Air blows it away in nearly everything. I’m not sure exactly what the difference is but in terms of UX, x86 ram needs do not translate to Apple Silicon 1:1

They do, you just notice it less. MacOS is notorious for having one of the most asinine memory management schemes in the history of software, and so causing a memory issue can be a bit of a finnecky task (but certainly not impossible). As a matter of fact, most times you don't even need to fill swap before MacOS runs out of memory: you just need to fool the OS into thinking the memory pressure is high enough to warra…

I’m not saying a byte isn’t a byte. I’m saying that if I don’t notice it, then I don’t need as much. I routinely swap 6-8gb and I can’t imagine this thing being faster. Most interactions are near instantaneous.

So my ram needs are lower precisely because I don’t notice it.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#326
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're getting open source RISC-V wich seems more promising long term than ARM.

You assume Risc V will be open source when it reaches consumers hands.

Just the design. Firmware and software probably not except for FOSS purist products.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Good thing I'm just explaining simple nuance then! And please make an announcement about your promotion to mod :)

I wish I was a mod! I could easily check just how many downvotes this whole thread gave you. Now the only thing I can do is to soothe my eyes by looking at all the wonderful shades of grey here.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#328

AFAIK GIFs for actual video content (rather than small animated (emot)icons) went obsolete in about 1995, when the first RealPlayer video plugin was released. Can someone explain to me why people are still using them for that 26 years later, especially now that we have much better formats like webm, mp4, or SVG, and will hopefully have AV1 hardware-supported in a few years ?

It's the only form of video which 1) browsers universally treat as an image file and which automatically, reliably and seamlessly loops and 2) also has wide support outside browsers and user familiarity.

The auto-start and auto-loop might or might not be wanted.

The main issue is just how freaking inefficiently huge gifs are for this use case : This whole thread, but also I was seeing an order of magnitude difference in a recent use-case I had, compared to mp4, which would have made sending the document by e-mail otherwise not viable.

(And imagine still living somewhere where a Mo of data doesn't have a negligible cost of transfer...)

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the category "fish" isn't a clade - it's possible to evolve to no longer be a fish - it's more comparable to a specific generation of ARM chips, like perhaps ARM32, than it is to the ARM line in general. It would be weird to say "64-bit ARMv5" in the same way that it would be weird to say "lactating fish". But it is not weird to say "64-bit ARM" for the same reason it isn't weird to say "lactating euteleostome.…

You guys are going to have to eat these words when fishermen off the coast of Madagascar pull up an example of Pisces lactatus.

Is that the scientific designation of mermaid fantasies of lonely fishermen?
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