jbenezech has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks, I'm starting to use Tk on Win32 for a small app. I start with a very lightweight timer window and I see the process is already using more than 7Mb in memory. The specs of my app (which is more than just this timer) require less than 4Mb so I have a small problem here.... Actually, just this code: use Tk; sleep(10000); uses more than 6Mb. Is there any way to reduce this memory overhead ? Thanks Jerome

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Re: Tk Win32 memory overhead
by jettero (Monsignor) on Nov 01, 2007 at 14:38 UTC
    I'm a little surprised it's that high, but I don't think there's a way to reduce that. It represents pulling up all those .pm and .dll symbols into the program's memory space. I suspect you're kinda stuck with it unless you build your own XS that does the Tk parts and only do perl things in perl.

    That's a doable thing, but probably a lot more work than you're hoping. XS can also be quite challenging. Perhaps Inline::C can help. Do your Tk things in there? Still seems like a lot of work. I hate to say it, but if you're trying to fit in a small amount of ram, the perl GUI choices may not be the best choice. :(

    -Paul

[reply]
Re: Tk Win32 memory overhead
by zentara (Cardinal) on Nov 01, 2007 at 16:58 UTC
    Yeah, that is the roughly normal mem size for a Tk window, even on linux.
    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum
[reply]

      But does it just do that from perl? or does it do that from C also? That's the real question imo.

      -Paul

[reply]
        Its hard to test Tk against C, but with Gtk2 it can be done. Below are the same program, one in Gtk2-c and one Gtk2-perl. Here are the top output when run: 
        # for c version
zentara   15   0 14368    7012   5400   S    0.0    0.7    0:00  .07 .
+/basic-window-c 

#for the Perl version
zentara   18   0   21700  12m    9056    S   0.0   1.3    0:00     12 
+ 
./basic-window.pl

        [download]
        As you can see Perl uses way more memory; 12m versus 7k for c. The question becomes, with systems with 1 and 2 gigs of ram being common, can you afford the extra ram usage, in exchange for the ease of writing it in Perl? For me, the answer is yes. C can take hours, where Perl is done in minutes. 
        /* compile  test-c.c with 
gcc  -o test-c  test-c.c  `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0`
*/

#include <gtk/gtk.h>

void destroy(GtkWidget *widget, gpointer data)
{
        gtk_main_quit();
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        GtkWidget *window;
        GtkWidget *button;
        gtk_init(&argc, &argv);
        window = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);

        g_signal_connect (G_OBJECT (window), "destroy", G_CALLBACK(des
+troy), 1);

        gtk_container_set_border_width(GTK_CONTAINER (window), 10);
        button = gtk_button_new_with_label ("Some Button");
        gtk_container_add(GTK_CONTAINER(window), button);
        gtk_widget_show(button);
        gtk_widget_show (window);
        gtk_main ();
        return 0; 
}

        [download]
        #!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Gtk2 '-init';

my $window = Gtk2::Window->new;
my $button = Gtk2::Button->new('Some Button');
my $vbox   = Gtk2::VBox->new();
$window->set( border_width => 15 );
$window->add($button);

$window->signal_connect('destroy', sub { Gtk2->main_quit });

$window->show_all();

Gtk2->main;

        [download]
        I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum
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