From Gnash Project Wiki

Static and dynamic memory consumption of various Gnash builds

Runtime memory footprint

Memory footprint of standalone Gnash running Bruno Bozzetto's Yes & No

Test version: Gnash CVS from March 2007 (or maybe cvs20060909?) configured with

--disable-plugin --disable-debugger --enable-sound=no

Render-GUI	VSIZ	RSS	SHR
agg-gtk	33372k	14m	8948k
agg-sdl	26564k	9396k	5124k
agg-fltk	24556k	8992k	4220k
cairo-fltk	184m	128m	4284k
cairo-gtk	192m	133m	8000k
cairo-sdl	187m	129m	5256k
opengl-gtk	62620k	15m	9336k
opengl-sdl	54932	10m	5324

• VSIZ = Virtual memory size, the total amount Gnash has requested from the OS
• RSS = Resident Set Size, the amount of physical RAM Gnash is actually using
• SHR = Shared Memory, indicative of the code size.

The most memory-economical combination is AGG-FLTK at 24MB VRAM, 9MB swapped in (the current agg-fb, not tested here, should be even smaller.)

Cairo VSIZ hovered around 50MB during most of the movie but bloated out to 190MB during the creation and moving of hundreds of small objects.

Last measured some time before 25 Mar 2007.

Static code size of gnash components

Or "Where's the text bloat?"

                         text  data/bss
libgnashgeo:             66538   916
libgnashgui: agg-fb      36280  1108
             agg-gtk     75247  2112
             agg-sdl     32597  1256
             cairo-gtk   69035  2096
             cairo-sdl   31386  1252
             opengl-gtk  70067  2192
             opengl-kde  50879  2280
             opengl-sdl  30892  1236
libgnashserver:        1613300  19504  Contains asobjs, parser, vm
libgnashasobjs:         589994  10872
libgnashamf:             42936  952
libgnashbackend:
             agg-fb     531987  6244
             agg-fltk   531991  6244
             agg-gtk    531987  6244
             agg-sdl    532005  6244
             cairo-fltk  45505  1452
             cairo-gtk   45624  1508
             cairo-kde   45503  1452
             cairo-sdl   45519  1460
             opengl-gtk  49682  1592
             opengl-kde  49561  1536
             opengl-sdl  49577  1544
libgnashplugin: ?
libklashpart: ?
gnash:                    ~19k  ~16k
gparser:                 20.8k   947
gprocessor:              15.5k   960

In brief:

• Most of the code size is in the device-independent parts of Gnash.
• The smallest render-GUI combination is cairo-sdl, with opengl-sdl a close second.
• Using AGG adds half a megabyte of code to Gnash, roughly a quarter of the total. This can be greatly reduced by configuring --with-pixelformat= (see configure --help).