composite manager and memory mgmt

[Tapani Pälli]

ext Felix Bellaby wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 15:39 +0200, Tapani P�lli wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>> I'm trying to build a sort of 'resource friendly' composite manager for
>> Maemo platform, code is based on xcompmgr code. I added another thread
>> that does some memory management keeping up a 'reasonable cache' of
>> renderpictures. Basically it frees pictures for every application window
>> that is not currently visible on the screen (pictures for windows that
>> are under current application window [1])
>>
>> Do you think this is a good approach? Should I free memory only when
>> something happens ('event based') or is threading safe option here?
>>     
>
> When you redirect a window using XComposite then the X server will
> allocate a new pixmap whenever the window is mapped and the X client
> will draw into that pixmap. The server maintains its own handle to this
> pixmap. The compositor normally obtains a handle to this pixmap for its
> own use by calling XCompositeNamedPixmap. The pixmap remains allocated
> until both of these handles have been released.
>
> The server releases its handle when the window is unmapped or
> unredirected. The compositor releases its handle by calling XFree.
>
> I suspect that you are performing an XFree on the compositor's pixmap
> handle while the window is _still_ mapped. This will not deallocate the
> memory used by the pixmap. Instead, it will introduce an unnecessary
> overhead when the next time that you call XCompositeNamedPixmap. This
> overhead is quite large on some platforms.
>
>   

OK, this is interesting. I haven't touched the pixmap resource through,
I'm currently trying to free the unnecessary Render pictures created and
managed by composite manager as these ones are not freed even though
window would not be visible, they are freed only when unmapping window.

> The compositor can only deallocate the pixmap memory after the window
> has been unmapped or unredirected. The compositor will normally lose
> interest in the pixmap shortly after the window is unmapped or
> unredirected and it should wait until then before performing an XFree.
>   
I'm trying to build some logic to have images available even after
window is destroyed, currently I'm doing this by having Render pictures
for those ones I want to save. But it seems I could keep using the named
pixmap.

> Hope this helps.
>
> Felix
>
>
>   

Many thanks for the help!

// Tapani