Article:		Cool Macworld Product: VectorDesigner
Subject:		Nice, but absolutely **voracious** with memory
Date:		2008-02-21 23:07:22
From:		pmccann
Not sure why you'd call VectorDesigner "unheralded": I seem to recall that it won "Best of Show" at Macworld. With that in mind I bought it as part of the MacHeist, but was quite shocked at the embryonic state of the application: layers were pretty much useless, memory was being gulped mercilessly, and the CPU use was extreme. To the developers credit a lot of the rough edges have vanished (the layers appear to operate much better now), but the memory usage is still utterly ridiculous. Here's an example, but pretty much anything will take its place. Draw a simply smooth curve, fill it with a simple black and white gradient. Copy it a copy of times (via option-drag say, another thing that was fixed), and then add text around the edge of one of the copies of the shape. Check out "Activity Monitor" (or "top" if you prefer) and you will notice some rather remarkable numbers. I see about 500MB of *real* memory being gulped. And it doesn't stabilise or release the memory with time (because of "undo" functionality I guess). In short, while it's definitely a promising app there's still a lot of work to be done to get this thing to play nicely with others. Paul

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• Nice, but absolutely **voracious** with memory
  2008-03-03 18:37:52  A. M. Kuchling | [View]
  
  
  I recently learned that realloc() on MacOS never rearranges memory, so if code allocates a very large region and then shrinks it down with realloc(), the unused space is still consumed. Maybe VectorDesigner is using realloc in this way, and maybe Apple has fixed the libc in 10.5.
  

• Nice, but absolutely **voracious** with memory
  2008-02-22 07:59:59  Piff [View]
  
  
  Hi,
  
  I am the developer of VectorDesigner and I am interested in reproducing the memory problem you are describing.
  I tried the steps you describe without being able to reproduce the problem: would you mind to contact me at "support AT tweakersoft.com" ?
  
  Thanks
  Marco
• Nice, but absolutely **voracious** with memory [correction]
  2008-02-23 00:17:08  pmccann [View]
  
  
  Hi Marco,
  
  I posted that earlier comment from work, after testing on a couple of machines (one Intel based, the other PPC). Having just tried to duplicate everything at home I see that VectorDesigner is now behaving like a model citizen, which is very embarrassing (but also really refreshing!). Please accept my apologies for the overblown first comment above. I can assure you that it was the result of a lot of playing with VectorDesigner -- I *like* the program a lot, which is why it seemed such a shame to be hitting the memory problems.
  
  I'll try and track down the essential differences I'm seeing -- the change is like night and day.
  
  By the way: is there a discussion group for VectorDesigner (or blog, or...)?
  
  Best wishes,
  Paul