[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] flist: Increase default list size to 256

[David Henningsson]

On 04/19/2012 11:45 AM, Dalleau, Frederic wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:54 AM, David Henningsson
> <david.henningsson at canonical.com>  wrote:
>> Nowadays, we are using more hashmaps and other things, than we did
>> before. Therefore, I often get the "flist is full (don't worry)"
>> message. This change should avoid that message. I was unable to find
>> any significance in increase of memory footprint from this change.
>
> I'm unsure whether this is the right solution to the problem.
>
>  From my understanding, the flist is used to store pointer to to-be-freed
> memory in order to reuse it later instead of calling pairs of xfree/xmalloc.
> Increasing the flist size would allow you to store more pointers and
> not free them, this is useless.
>
> However, you should really worry about why a specific flist is full
> since this means
> more than 128 pointer of the same type have been freed in a row
> without a single allocation.

Ok, so I did some more research. I also found a slightly better scenario.
The scenario is that I have my USB headset plugged in, I start 
pulseaudio, and when pulseaudio is running, I unplug my headset.

This leads to 472 entries inserted into the "hashmap" flist.
311 of these belong to module-dbus-protocol.so.
113 is coming from pa_proplist_free - the card proplist has 21 entries, 
the sink and source proplists have 35, the sink monitor's has 20.

Those are the biggies, it seems like.
Given this research, what do you suggest?

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic