Re: Usability Question

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Andrzej Kopec escreveu:

> I also have a usability question. I'm using lilypond-2.10.11 (linux
> executable) on intel centrino 1.4MHz with 256MB of RAM, and I cannot
> render 10 page chamber piece of music due to lack of memory. after
> 15 min I stop "Layout outputting to 'xxx.ps'" and I found outputted
> 4 pages of 10. If I turn swap off, I'm given "Out of memory error".

Try 2.11/10.12.  I've implemented some new memory tracing tools, which 
indicated that the use
of (ice-9 format) routine was eating tremendous amounts of memory. With .12, 
the memory use
should be almost halved. 

> I won't mention some memory segm. faults which disappeared when
> eg. I changed one tuplet to regular eighths (I had to change the
> piece, fortunately -- my own).

Well, you mentioned them anyway.  I take memory corruption and other
sorts of heisenbugs *very* seriously, and I want to hear about them. I
can't recall reading your bugreport about this.  Bugs such as these
get priority "high" in the bugtracker, and they're the first on my
list to fix.

> So my question is if I have to buy new hardware to be able to use my
> preferred software?  Or whether it would help if I compiled lily
> myself? Would I be indecently curious if I ask you about your
> experiences with large lilypond projects (if 10-page piece can be
> regarded as "large") and your hardware?

I think your best bet is to see if you can upgrade RAM of your
machine. Most of the improvements of lilypond seem to come at the
expense of memory usage.

Other than that, over the years we've added lots more automated
formatting tweaks, which should make most of the exotic, hand-coded
tweaks superfluous.  However, we have to pay for this with CPU and
memory.  The use of skyline spacing, both horizontal and vertical,
comes to mind as an example.

> Upro, and I, and anyone who professionally deal with music,
> esp. making visual representation of her, in a long run needs
> reliable environment.

Unfortunately, that's something I can't guarantee, especially for
free.

However, managing different branches has become a lot easier now that
we use GIT. That's why so many of the bugfixes in 2.11 have made it
back into 2.10.

Still, it's work.  I for one, would welcome it if someone would help
with backporting bugfixes. With GIT it's not that difficult, but it
requires moderate programming knowledge.


-- 

Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen

LilyPond Software Design
 -- Code for Music Notation
http://www.lilypond-design.com