[Solved] Memory consumption while loading layouts.

[Yevgeny]

Hello!

I use CEGUI 0.7.7 with Ogre renderer. I call

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CEGUI::WindowManager::getSingleton().loadWindowLayout(root);

to load a list of 17 layout files. Each of them contains a lot of CEGUI elements, mostly StaticImage or ImageButton. Total amount of elements in all files is about 2500.
After calling loadWindowLayout() I've noticed huge memory consumption of 150 Mbytes(!).
All imageset atlas textures are much smaller and they are loaded before layouts.
Are there any mechanisms in CEGUI that can occupy this memory, internal buffers or something like this? AutoRenderingSurface property is False on every element.

[Ident]

Each window has a lot of properties, which are strings, that have to be stored, as well as a couple of other attributes. Multiplying that memory with 2500 can lead to quite some consumption, but 150 megabytes stills sounds too high to me. AutoRenderingSurface was a good shot by you, but you say it is always deactivated, so there is not much left that could cause such memory usage.

0.7.X is very old, I m mostly familiar with 0.8.X and default-repository code so I cannot really tell what is going on there. You could try to use some sort of tool that tracks memory consumption in a program maybe, in which case you should tell us the results, it might be valuable even for higher versions.

Or even easier: Try to only create certain types of windows and see if it makes a difference for the memory what type of window you create.

[Yevgeny]

Thanks for your reply.

As a quick solution, I've just made loading/unloading of needed layouts.
Then I tried to load a layout with 100 TaharezLook/StaticImage's and got memory usage of 1.737.104 bytes.
With 100 TaharezLook/StaticText's I got 19.654.864 bytes.
So the problem is in StaticText - it is too heavy for frequent usage. It is also noted here:
http://cegui.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2427

I'll try to find lightweight analog like Label or Caption.
Yes, 0.7.x is old, but changing to newer version right now in our project wasn't the point. .)

[Ident]

There is a lightweight "Generic/Label" in 0.8.X . You might wanna try to adopt it into 0.7.X, should be easy.

[Yevgeny]

Thanks, I will try.

[Yevgeny]

Here are steps that I've made:

Copy/paste Label widget from TaharezLook.looknfeel of CEGUI 0.8.x to the same file in my CEGUI 0.7:

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<WidgetLook name="TaharezLook/Label">
  ...
</WidgetLook>

Add the following line to TaharezLook.scheme file:

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<FalagardMapping WindowType="TaharezLook/Label" TargetType="DefaultWindow" Renderer="Falagard/Default" LookNFeel="TaharezLook/Label" />

Change TaharezLook/StaticText to TaharezLook/Label in all my layout-files.

And that's it, 123 MBytes are back! Thanks!

Note that to vary color we now have to use NormalTextColour property instead of TextColours for StaticText.

[Ident]

Thanks for showing your solution! I am sure this will be helpful to some.


Btw which type of strings do you use? You might wanna use std::string instead of CEGUI::string to save extra memory space, but of course only if ASCII is enough for you.

[Yevgeny]

Strings and localization is not my area, it's up to my colleague, but when putting text into CEGUI windows we convert it to CEGUI::string. Anyway, we need multilanguage, so ASCII is not enough.

[Ident]

Then that is the only possibility atm. We don't support UTF-16 and UTF-8 yet. (We are open to contributions of course)