Zerebus crashing

CPU specs:

Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                2
On-line CPU(s) list:   0,1
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    2
Socket(s):             1
NUMA node(s):          1
Vendor ID:             AuthenticAMD
CPU family:            15
Model:                 107
Stepping:              1
CPU MHz:               2600.000
BogoMIPS:              5223.59
Virtualization:        AMD-V
L1d cache:             64K
L1i cache:             64K
L2 cache:              512K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0,1

Memory before firing up mscore (in Mb):

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1874       1016        858        125         11        360
Swap:         1916          0       1916

Memory after firing up mscore:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1874       1203        671        130         13        447
Swap:         1916          0       1916

Memory after loading Salamander .sfz:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1874       1802         72        115          1        146
Swap:         1916        386       1530

'mscore' isn't spitting anything to stderr or stdout when invoked from the command line.

Observing what's happening with memory while the font is loading, I see that it starts to hang at the moment swapping begins, so yes, it appears to be a memory problem.

FWIW, no other programs I run regularly exhibit this behaviour when there's heavy swapping. On an average day, I can be running a full compositing KDE desktop with all the bells and whistles, the memory hog called Firefox, a file manager, a pdf viewer, a terminal window and a media player and still load something huge like the GIMP—with much swapping— in about 10 seconds. Of course, all this stuff is shut down when I'm working on a MuseScore project.

I normally use linuxsampler (with the full Java interface) to load Salamander, which I do after firing up mscore. The font's a little slow to load compared to others, but the lag is minimal, just a couple of seconds.