[audidude]

As someone who went down this path many years ago, I think the GTK numbers in the article are a bit misleading. You wouldn't create 1000 buttons to do a flamegraph properly in GTK.

In Sysprof, it uses a single widget for the flamegraph which means in less than 150 mb resident I can browse recordings in the GB size range. It really comes down to how much data gets symbolized at load time as the captures themselves are mmap'able. In nominal cases, Sysprof even calculates those and appends them after the capture phase stops so they can be mmap'd too.

That just leaves the augmented n-ary tree key'd by instruction pointer converted to string key, which naturally deduplicates/compresses.

The biggest chunk of memory consumed is GPU shaders.