X Server: abused or buggy?

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2008 16:08:33 +0000
"John Tapsell" <johnflux at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/12/9 Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>:
> >> Why should it be a KDE bug if the X server is leaking memory?  I used to
> >
> > The KDE app told X to cache all those pixmaps. X is just doing what it
> > was asked to. The alternative would be that it decided to kill off that
> > client for being dumb.
> 
> There seems to be a little bit of confusion here.  It seems to me that
> Oscar is saying that the memory usage of X remains high even after
> closing Okular.  Even if Okular told X to cache those pixmaps,
> shouldn't they be fully released after Okular quits?

Implementation detail of the memory management. Depending how objects are
laid out in memory the pages may not be reclaimable entirely, and the
glibc memory manager also makes decisions based upon performance versus
swap usage tradeoffs. Those you can btw configure.