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Forums » Elegant Ribbon Tech Support » Memory consumption Collapse All
Subject Author Date
Joerg Androw Jul 9, 2009 - 5:50 AM

I’ve noticed that your demo application for the ribbon (RibbonUISample) uses a whopping 200 MB memory on my machine (Windows 7 RC1). If I myself create a small test app, place 2 buttons on the ribbon and start the app, the Task manager shows 90MB - after a couple of seconds of interaction with the ribbon it will go back to 70MB (which is still high). I’m wondering is that always the case and why (using only 2 built-in themes)? I’m evaluating the ribbon for my rather small-to-medium application (max 50MB in the Task manager) and if the memory consumption for it when switching from Menu/Toolbar to Ribbon increases to 4x-6x of where it is today - it’s a big no-no. Thanks.

Technical Support Jul 11, 2009 - 11:47 AM

The RibbonUISample has a large amount of image resources in memory. Besides, each .NET application consumes nearly two times more of memory resources on 64-bit system than on 32-bit. We estimate that your application should use about 35-40 MB on 32-bit machines. We agree that 70 MB is quite a lot, but the ribbon control has a rich UI interface which means a lot of image resources. In the last couple of days we fixed a couple of bugs related to memory management and reduced memory usage especially while switching the themes and cleaning the memory after control objects that are not used anymore. If it is interesting to you, we can provide you with this update. Thank you.

Joerg Androw Jul 11, 2009 - 1:53 PM

Are you talking specifically about images on buttons that consume so much memory or the ribbon UI itself? I understand that you’re using a different approach similar to xaml - whatever - e.g . not painting the ribbon UI using GDI/GDI+ methods everytime - maybe there is a way to optimize this even further.
Yes please, I would like to test your changes in the update. Thank you.

Technical Support Jul 13, 2009 - 12:17 PM

Please download the updated assemblies from this site. Thank you.

Technical Support Jul 12, 2009 - 5:25 AM

The ribbon control itself consumes a relatively large amount of memory because there are separate theme resources for nearly all controls in the ribbon. You may have noticed that the Button control, for example, looks a bit different when it is on the ribbon vs when it is on the form. In order to manage this appearance for ribbon we created separate theme assemblies with names like Elegant.Ui.Ribbon.Theme.XXX.dll. When you run an application with the ribbon control, it automatically loads resources both for standard controls(that may appear on the form or panel) and the ribbon controls(all controls that can be placed inside a ribbon group). Every theme part is stored as a png file, but when loaded in memory, it gets rasterized to be painted effectively. For all images, that increases memory usage. Probably the updated version will use a little less memory but at the moment technically it is hardly possible to reduce memory consumption significantly. We will prepare the new version on Monday and provide you with a download link.