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RAM usage on iMac M1

Posted: 29 Jul 2022
by franvelasco
Hello everyone,

My name's Fran Velasco from Seabell Studio, first post here, loving Kern-On!
I have an issue with the plugin: every time I try to launch it, after a couple seconds while it still says "Starting up..." the RAM usage goes up to 48-50GB (my iMac has 8GB of ram). I'm using Glyphs v3.1 and Kern On v1.15.

Apple M1 chips use the integrated hard drive as RAM when the dedicated one is full, I guess the issue is its usage by Kern On seems unlimited. Never happened before on my previous 8GB Macbook, much slower than this one.

The fonts I'm working on for this project are very limited character-wise: A-Z with diacritics, 0-9 and around 20 punctuation glyphs. Only 110 in total. As a reference, previous fonts with same character set on the other computer took around 30 seconds to kern (around 2 seconds a couple days ago when it still worked on the iMac), creating 2-3000 kerning pairs.

How can I solve this?

Thanks!

Re: RAM usage on iMac M1

Posted: 29 Jul 2022
by Tim Ahrens
Hello Fran, 50GB does sound too much indeed. I can have another look at the RAM usage here on various computers.

What exactly is the problem you are experiencing? Is Kern On or Glyphs crashing? Is it unexpectedly slow?

Re: RAM usage on iMac M1

Posted: 30 Jul 2022
by franvelasco
Hi, Tim. Glyphs works ok, but the second I open the Kern On floating window from the menu, it freezes everything. And that’s it, MacOS prompt me to close Glyphs because it’s unusable.

I've also tried another small font and it freezes and prompts me to close Glyphs before finishing kerning.

Re: RAM usage on iMac M1

Posted: 31 Jul 2022
by Tim Ahrens
Would you mind sending me the .glyphs file? Then I can have a closer look. Thanks!

Re: RAM usage on iMac M1

Posted: 31 Jul 2022
by franvelasco
Solved! The issue was that somehow the Kern On plugin crashes when doing its job while the diacritics have the wrong name. Thanks a lot to Viktor Baltus from Old Type Foundry for letting me know after looking at the file.

In Viktor's own words:

"What you’ve created are the legacy marks. Those 13 (diacritics) that don’t end with comb. Comb stands for combining, the legacy marks can/need to be generated AFTER you’ve drawn the comb versions. This is a technical part to make the font more compatible with older design software. They are not recognized by Kern On as features within the kerning sets."

Here's the file in case you want to take a look:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/iyjgjba3zj991 ... lyphs?dl=0

I think it would be great if the plugin could warn you before freezing Glyphs. Maybe it's an easy fix that could save someone in the future.

Thanks for your help!!

Re: RAM usage on iMac M1

Posted: 07 Aug 2022
by Tim Ahrens
Thanks for the file! I just fixed the crash, it was not related to anything particular in your file, just a common small coding bug (integer underflow, to be precise) that lead KO to book an extremely large amount of memory in rare cases.

You can get the update from https://kern-on.com/update/