uses too much memory

 Scott, can you confirm this is still an issue with the latest granite/oneiric? Pantheon-wallpaper does take a decent amount of RAM, but I have found that even after changing wallpapers dozens of times it never goes above 50MB.

As Max explained it to me, it takes up much RAM because it needs to hold two buffers for the images in RAM simultaneously.

In any event, can you confirm whether your memory usage grows boundlessly, or if there's some cutoff point that would indicate that it isn't a bug and simply being something of an inherent ram hog?

Marking as incomplete for now.

Here's a memory consumption graph

a script to generate it

and the raw log used for the graph

oh nvm, must be flawed somehow...

OK this works

no, it doesn't. derp.

OK, THIS finally works.
The script monitors existing pantheon-wallpaper process if there's one, and spawns one if there isn't. It changes wallpaper lots of times, logs memory usage in kB after every change and finally feeds the log to gnuplot.

log for "fresh start" (process spawned from the script)

It still uses around 30 MB RAM here. Tooo much, for such a program!

Can't we use the standard gnome one? I noted that when you kill pantheon wallpaper, and wait some time, somehow a desktop background gets drawn (without nautilus).

Without pantheon wallpaper RAM usage is around 200 MB. That is btw. really awesome.

Hmmm, I took a quick look at the code, and the best solution would be dropping the buffers. They're only used for smooth transitions between wallpapers AFAIK.

We can't drop the buffers obviously, but that memory should be freed after every crossfade.

Here's the grapher script updated for settings location of latest trunk