memory leaks in the current Xserver

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-12-03 13:45+0100 Lukas Hejtmanek wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 02:33:18PM +0200, Marius Gedminas wrote:
>> Once I had my X server eat 528 megs RSS, while xrestop claimed the
>> clients were claiming 18 megs.  I restarted compiz and X's memory usage
>> shrank to 137 megs RSS.  Apparently the memory used by textures or
>> whatnot is not seen by xrestop.
>
> I do not use compiz or any other composite manager. I suspect these leaks are
> induced by firefox.

The memory-leak behaviour I am seeing is that roughly 2MB/hour is added to
the Res column in "top" for Xorg for a completely inactive KDE desktop. This
was an overnight test with akregator and all instances of browsers turned
off and no special 3D desktop effects configured.  For example, my
screensaver was just the blank screen.  For an active KDE desktop the
2MB/hour leak continues with no substantial change in the memory-leak rate.
So I think this memory leak is in some commonly used part of the the X
server as opposed to being a memory leak that is induced only by certain
individual X clients such as firefox.

Daniel, you might want to just try invoking bare X (with no clients) to see
if you get the leak in that circumstance.  If bare X has the memory leak,
then that should substantially narrow your search for the cause.

I am running a lightly patched (see previous thread) version 2.2.0 of the
xf86-video-intel driver module on the Intel g33 chipset. This is for the
Debian unstable version of xorg which (for package xserver-xorg-core) is
version 2:1.4.1~git20071119-1.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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