memory leak in X server

Adam Jackson ajackson at redhat.com
Tue Sep 5 01:51:14 UTC 2006


Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> Tomasz Kłoczko wrote:
>> Yesterday I perform upgrade and after ~30h now I have:
>>
>>  3442 root      15   0 1113m 948m  11m S   20 46.8 206:30.92 Xorg
>> but in this probably I found cause. xrestop shows:
>>
>> xrestop - Display: localhost:0
>>           Monitoring 38 clients. XErrors: 0
>>           Pixmaps: 1183805K total, Other:     218K total, All: 1184024K
>> total
>> res-base Wins  GCs Fnts Pxms Misc   Pxm mem  Other   Total   PID
>> Identifier    2a00000   638   47    1 4072  164   1112938K     20K 
>> 1112959K  3752 UF -
>> Cartoon Archive
>>
>> "UF - Cartoon Archive" it is galeon resources. After killing galeon top
>> shows:
>>
>>  3442 root      19   0  304m 191m  10m R   74  9.4 209:07.55 Xorg
>>
>> kloczek
>>
>>
> 
> Galeon is Gecko based and Gecko loves to store huge amounts of pixmaps 
> in the X server. Whenever you want to measure Xorg memory usage it's a 
> good idea to close any instance of Firefox/Seamonkey/Galeon/whatever first.

I'll go stronger than this.  If you want to measure X memory usage, 
don't run Gecko for that session.  Virtual size doesn't always shrink 
back down the way you expect it to.

It's not completely fair to blame this solely on Gecko.  If you were to 
move all image storage to the client side and only push when you 
absolutely needed to, memory usage might appear to go down for the 
server, but it'd go up (more!) for the client, and rendering latency 
would go up, and you'd lose some battery life because you're doing lots 
of repeated work, and...

- ajax




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list