Re: Xorg memory issues

Alf Schlichting wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Looking at top on my -current System i see this (running kde):
> 
> leopold@werkel:184$ top -bd1 -U _x11
> load averages:  0.44,  0.26,  0.14    08:00:09
> 69 processes:  1 running, 67 idle, 1 on processor
> 
> Memory: Real: 219M/394M act/tot  Free: 105M  Swap: 74M/1024M used/tot
> 
> 
>   PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    WAIT     TIME    CPU COMMAND
>  6544 _x11      28    0  145M  125M run      -      125:26  0.00% Xorg
> 
> leopold@werkel:185$ uptime
>  8:00AM  up 5 days, 15:12, 0 users, load averages: 0.31, 0.24, 0.14
> leopold@werkel:186$
> 
> ..... 3 days later:
> 
> leopold@werkel:255$ top -bd 1 -U _x11
> load averages:  0.08,  0.14,  0.10    12:13:08
> 76 processes:  1 running, 74 idle, 1 on processor
> 
> Memory: Real: 238M/408M act/tot  Free: 91M  Swap: 85M/1024M used/tot
> 
> 
>   PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    WAIT     TIME    CPU COMMAND
>  6544 _x11       2    0  168M  153M sleep    select 181:21  0.05% Xorg
> 
> leopold@werkel:256$ uptime
> 12:13PM  up 8 days, 19:24, 0 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.15, 0.10
> leopold@werkel:257$ uname -a
> OpenBSD werkel.rechners.lemarit.com 3.7 GENERIC#166 i386
> leopold@werkel:258$
> 
> Looks like Xorg is slowly growing. Has anybody seen this too?
> 

Yes. There can be a lot of reasons for that. The main ones are:
- it's not completely impossible that some part of the X server still 
has some real leaks. However, no X developper has never been able to 
identify one when using tools like purify on systems that support it.

- applications may create resources (mostly pixmaps) allocated by them 
into the X server. The mozillas are specificly known to allocate 
thousands of small images in the X server. Until you quit the 
application those resources are not freed. And then, there is the malloc 
behaviour that may or not give back the freed memory to the OS.

-- 
Matthieu Herrb