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<[email protected]> |
Remember folks, please, that we developed X11 on Vax 11/750's with 2 meg of RAM.
We run the kdrive X server on iPAQ PDA's and others, which, depending
on the model, have 16, 32, or 64 meg of RAM. The X server is well under
1 megabyte in size, including Render and a number of other extensions;
when running it takes maybe 2 megabytes RAM. We could go much further
in reducing the footprint if we needed to, but it doesn't seem worthwhile
right now as the big offenders are toolkit and applications, not X itself.
The one thing we're expermenting with right now is using mallopt to
allow the X server to return more VM to the operating system from pixmap
use: better yet would be to probably separate pixmap storage in the server
from the general heap and do a compacting GC on pixmap storage.
Various stuff has bloated over the years, but it is generally on the
applications side. Sometimes you think the X server is bloating, when it
is really that applications have a pixmap leak, for example. If your
application asks the X server to store a 4 megabyte image in it, it
obediently does so. This isn't X's fault, but the application's request;
fix the busted application....
The new Xres extension (which we should have done something like 15 years
ago) helps in debugging such broken applications.
- Jim
--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
[email protected]