repeated font changes eventually hang the OS or at least the GUI

[RootlessAgrarian]

I was trying out a collection of TTF that I had placed in /usr/share/fonts; I used the same page of one epub for all my font tests. So, systematically, I went to the Settings Menu, picked Format (1), then Font (1), then chose a font from the list (3 menus deep on my system at the time), then backed out and watched the page refresh, taking notes on which fonts display well on the eInk screen and which look ragged or thin. I would start at point size 10, zoom to 12, then back to 10.

I had gone through about 2.5 menus of fonts when I noticed response time slowing down. I kept at it. Somewhere in menu 3, the slowness became painful. It took longer and longer to navigate the menus and a very long time indeed to zoom. Eventually, the page repaint time (for zoom) became infinite for all practical purposes – a minute+ went by between button press and page refresh, and I was hopelessly out of synch (not sure how many times I had pressed the buttons). There was no way to interrupt (that I know of) except the reset button in back.

So that's what I did. After a reboot things were back to normal and I finished testing the last menu of fonts.

I speculate that changing the font in the epub reader somehow eats memory – a leak? and if you do it enough times (which the normal user never would) eventually the OS starves for mem and swaps itself into catatonia. That is mere speculation, however. I was not watching "top" at the time.

[lunohod]

Sounds like a memory leak.

[cloggy]

I have seen the same behavior..and it drove me nuts seeing the green led flashing but nothing was happening.