X server memory footprint growing continuously and monotonically over time

[Joel Feiner]

Omari Stephens wrote:
> Joel Feiner wrote:
>> I used to think that too, but when I've had the same problem, xrestop 
>> shows considerably less memory usage than the amount of memory in the 
>> X server's heap (via /proc/<PID>/maps).  Firefox is a big offender 
>> when it comes to triggering this behavior in X.  Sometimes I get that 
>> behavior after only a few hours of using Firefox when visiting sites 
>> with lots of images.  All my RAM is used up and I go into swap.
> 
> Joel was more right about this than I knew.  After running out of memory 
> yet again, I killed firefox.  Which took me from
> $procmap.sh 29998
>   PID    VSZ DEVMAP LIBMAP  ALLOC    RSS  CMDLINE
> 29998 1276960 278848 543520 454592 686368  /usr/bin/X11/X -dpi 100 
> -nolisten tcp
> 
> to
> 
> $procmap.sh `pidof X`
>   PID    VSZ DEVMAP LIBMAP  ALLOC    RSS  CMDLINE
> 29998 879664 278848 588388  12428 373588  /usr/bin/X11/X -dpi 100 
> -nolisten tcp
> 
> This despite that xrestop told me that firefox was using ~100 megs for 
> pixmaps.  To be more clear, before closing firefox, I had 200 megs of 
> memory free (after having closed something else).  After  closing 
> firefox, I suddenly had 900 megs of memory free.
> 
> procmap is the script I grabbed from [1].
> 
> [1] http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-April/003370.html
> 
> --xsdg
> 
> 

For me, many times, closing Firefox doesn't help.  The memory usage 
remains high.  Occasionally starting Firefox shortly after closing it 
results in the memory being freed.  It's very strange.

- Joel