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From: jis@mtgzx.att.com (J Mukerji)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: Re: Help and its memory usage behavior
Message-ID: <sa1vhuG753w7A23vZI@gazelle.att.com>
Date: 21 Mar 90 17:35:54 GMT
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Excerpts from info-andrew: 20-Mar-90 Re: Help and its memory usa..
Nathaniel Borenstein@thu (1793)

>  I'm not convinced there's any reason to use buffers at all in help, and
I'm highly skeptical that the buffers should be preserved once they're
> no longer visible.  (Conceivably you might want a heuristic, so that the
> longer troff-derived help files, such as "csh", would be preserved in a
> buffer so that you didn't have to run rofftext on them twice.  But
> mostly, it is so quick to read in a new help file that it is silly to
> waste the memory by keeping it around.)

Buffer or no buffer, Help at present proceeds to run troff on the same
file over and over anyway. I think even if it is decided to continue to
use buffers for some documents like 'csh' for caching as suggested by
Nathaniel,  a way must be provided to get rid of that document to
release memory without getting out of Help altogether. When one has been
in Help for a while there is much state information that is stored in
the panels that one would rather not lose, simply to get rid of some
memory hog document that one happened to have stumbled upon at some
point.

                            Jishnu Mukerji,  
                           jis@mtgzx.att.com, 
                           +1 201 957 5986,  
                        AT&T Bell Laboratories, 
                      MT 3K-423, 200 Laurel Ave., 
                           Middletown NJ 07748