Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 112204
X-Server needs a lot of memory
Last modified: 2007-04-18 13:00:13 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031210 Description of problem: Hi, I am using RH9 on a PII350 with 256 MB RAM and about 800MB swap. My graphic card is an Nividia Riva 128zx. With the X-Server I am using the "nv" driver. I usually boot to runlevel 3 and start the X-Server with either "startx" or with "startxfce4" (http://www.xfce.org). No matter which desktop environment I start, the X-server needs about 35-40MB of RAM in the beginning. After having worked for a few hours, the memory usage usually increases up to 100-150MB. The top value I've measured can be seen in the screenshot above: 335MB (!). I cannot believe, that this is normal ! Ok, I am working with eclipse and mozilla, which both need a lot of RAM, but closing such apps won't lead to a decrease of memory usage. Maybe there's a memoryleak in the nv driver !? It must be a component of the X-server, which is special to my machine, since most people don't have this X-server memory problem. I've also experienced that my machine couldn't shut down the X-server, due to high swapping. I've had no more keyboard or mouse access to my machine then. After a few minutes the swapping stopped and I was forced to reset the machine. I hope, someone can help ! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): XFree86-4.3.0-2.90.43 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. start the X-server with a riva 128zx graphic card. 2. work with it for some hours. 3. Actual Results: high memory usage, a lot of swapping. Expected Results: memory usage of about 40-55MB for the X-server Additional info: I don't know when this problem started, but I didn't have this problem with RH9 in the beginning. Maybe there's a problem with the updated XFree Version, which I've installed a few week/months ago !?
Nothing you describe above is abnormal in any way. You can not interpret the memory usage reported by top or ps for the X server in the same way you interpret other applications because: 1) It includes memory mapped video memory and MMIO hardware I/O register ranges, which can be anywhere from a few megabytes, to several hundred megabytes - neither of which are actual system memory. 2) X resources, which are stored _inside_ the X server, are allocated by applications, and remain in the X server until the application frees them or exits. Any application can leak resources such as pixmaps, and this will cause the X server to increase in size, not the application. People usually believe that the X server is at fault and has a memory leak in such cases, when it is not, and the application(s) are what is buggy. 99% of all "the X server is leaking memory" bug reports turn out to be false, and so I have to assume that all such bug reports are application bugs and resource leaks in the applications the user is using, until the user can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that their applications are not leaking resources or otherwise causing the X server memory footprint to increase. Now, you mention also that you did not have this problem in the beginning, which I presume means when you installed Red Hat Linux 9. Presumeably you've upgraded your entire system to the latest updates available from up2date, and something has changed. Can you downgrade all of the XFree86 packages to the original XFree86 that shipped with RHL 9, and reboot, and see if the problem persists? While the likelyhood of this being an X server or video driver memory leak is very slim, it is not impossible, but we will need to see compelling evidence of this first before it can be examined. Also, I do not have Nvidia Riva 128 video hardware, so I can't test with that hardware. Can you try another video card to see if the problem persists? That would be useful information. Please attach your X server log file, config file, and /var/log/messages as individual uncompressed file attachments using the link below.
Since this bugzilla report was filed, there have been several major updates to the X Window System, which may resolve this issue. Users who have experienced this problem are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of Fedora Core, which can be obtained from: http://fedora.redhat.com/download If this issue turns out to still be reproduceable in the latest version of Fedora Core, please file a bug report in the X.Org bugzilla located at http://bugs.freedesktop.org in the "xorg" component. Once you've filed your bug report to X.Org, if you paste the new bug URL here, Red Hat will continue to track the issue in the centralized X.Org bug tracker, and will review any bug fixes that become available for consideration in future updates.