Scrivener/Wine memory issue

Hi, all,

There’s a thread on this but it hasn’t drawn any new responses recently.

Scrivener 2.9.XXX (the latest beta) running under Wine on Xubuntu 18.04.

Scrivener doesn’t release memory when I exit the program. If I close Scrivener and start it up again later, it grabs another chunk of memory. Eventually, there’s enough memory tied up to bork the system. Also, the system hangs if I try to shut it down without clearing the memory first.

I don’t know if the fault is Scrivener’s or Wine’s. Anyone have a better option than “killall Scrivener”?

That must be frustrating. I don’t if you’ll get a response. I still can’t get my copy to register while using Wine so there’s that. I’d love to be wrong but it doesn’t seem as if L&L care much about Linux users?

Hi, jd,

To be fair, I wouldn’t expect any company selling Mac and Windows software to provide support for running their product on Linux. L&L’s tech support has helped me in a couple of instances, however.

The place to get help with Wine, POL, etc, is here in the forums. Someone will come along.

I thought the registration problem had been taken care of.
[url]https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/license-manager-now-fails/46270/1]

L&L officially discontinued Linux support a while ago (the last released version for Linux predates the necessary changes in the file format to support syncing to the iOS version). Running the Windows version under Wine is, as I understand it, at best peer supported in these forums, not officially supported.

That is correct. Running any version of Scrivener under any flavor of Unix is unsupported and entirely at the user’s own risk.

Katherine

I’m running B29 on Debian 10 with Wine Staging 4 (can’t remember the exact sub-number) on a Thinkpad 440, and I haven’t noticed any problems like this (with any of the earlier betas, either)—certainly no crashes, but I haven’t explicitly checked the memory.

If you could say exactly what tests you’ve run to identify the problem (e.g. how you’re tracking the memory retention), I’ll try to replicate them. (Please be explicit: I know my way round the command line, but know nothing about memory allocation…)

Hi, brookter,

I’m no whiz at the terminal either. I’m running Xubuntu 18.04, Wine 3.0 (That’s what’s in the standard repository. Staging has always given me trouble when I’ve tried it.), Scrivener-- latest beta.

Probably irrelevant-- older I3 Dell desktop and an ASUS I5 laptop. I have the same issue with both.

I was playing with the beta, changing settings, options, etc. Some of those require you restart Scrivener for the new setting to take effect. After several restarts, my system slowed way down and just generally acted weird. I shut down Scrivener, then pulled up task manager. 87% of 4Gb’s of memory was taken. There were also two or three instances of Scrivener still running. When I opened a terminal and killed those instances, used memory dropped to under 25%.

Scrivener isn’t shutting down cleanly. Wine may be the cause but I don’t have a clue how to trouble-shoot that short of trying different Wine versions.

Incidentally, I was having an issue of both systems hanging when shutting Linux down. Cleaning up the memory before shutting down solved that problem.

I’m getting ready to set up a new install on another partition and switch everything over so if you aren’t having the same problem with memory I may have to try Staging again.

There is a long history of Scrivener v. 3 Betas not shutting down cleanly under WINE. I run it under Crossover for testing purposes, since my collaborator is on Windows. When I Exit Scrivener, my Mac menu still shows Scrivener as running, I have to shut down Crossover for it to clear. I don’t know enough about running WINE directly to know if that would be the same for you.

Mark

@Garpu has also commented on it not closing cleanly too in past threads.

I’ll check and report back any problems (and version numbers) next time I’m on the laptop…

I only use the laptop for Scrivener and Firefox so it’s possible I just haven’t noticed any problems…,

Which version of wine are you using? Around 4.15 (staging), it started exiting cleanly again. (Also exits cleanly with 4.19-staging.) I would not recommend anything below 4.15.

Right, had a chance to test it and I can detect no accumulation of memory following successive opening and closing of Scrivener – Top shows available memory always returns to the pre-running level after I’ve closed it.

Details:
Scrivener B29
Debian 10.2
Wine-staging: 4.20~buster

Not sure what that tells us, mind, but there you go…

Much thanks, Brookter, Garpu;

So, it’s time to upgrade Wine. Wonder how many people are running Scrivener under lower versions of Wine?
As I said, the memory allocation issue also caused my systems to hang at shutdown.

Well, it’s off to the repositories.

It could also be a patch that staging has that stock WINE doesn’t. You can see if there are any processes sticking around by running "lsof | egrep “wine” after closing scrivener.

I’d always recommend using the most current version of WINE, unless the thing you’re running (like an older game) has a regression with a newer version. (And even then, it should be reported to the WINE people, because odds are it’s a problem for something else down the road.) The “development” version of WINE is quite stable, and even if you use wine-staging, I’ve never had problems. (wine-staging is a bit more experimental.)