X server memory footprint growing continuously and monotonically over time

[Remy Bosch]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 06:39:03AM +0000, Omari Stephens wrote:
>   
>> Hi, all.  This is a continuation to my email "X server occupying > 1 GB of 
>> memory".  Since that email, my box ran completely out of memory (thank goodness 
>> for the OOM-killer), so I restarted X and had most of my 2 gigs back, as expected.
>>
>> http://people.csail.mit.edu/xsdg/x-mem/nov2/x-memory.png
>>
>> Note that the X server's memory footprint grows at a fixed rate of about 0.5 
>> megabytes per hour.  That is, every 24 hours, X packs on about 12 megs of 
>> memory.  On top of this base rate, pixmaps cause the footprint to grow and 
>> shrink a bit, but after around 2 weeks, the space used for pixmaps is less than 
>> half of what X is using itself.
>>
>> Again, if anybody has any ideas of things to check, things to poke at, or folks 
>> to talk to, I am sort of desperate.
>>     

You message was a wake-up call since I had mysterious oom-killings recently.
With the help of your script, I see rising mem-usage:
A shorteded list:
0x08aeb000 - 0x081dd000 = 9494528 <- start-value
0x0915e000 - 0x081dd000 = 16257024
0x08dee000 - 0x081dd000 = 12652544
0x08e68000 - 0x081dd000 = 13152256
0x09455000 - 0x081dd000 = 19365888

I run gentoo with xorg-server-1.4-r2 and xf86-video-i810-2.1.99
So, no nvidia related ;-)


Remy