I have GNOME's random screensaver feature enabled, and was switched to the console while X was running random screensavers. The system became very slow while typing and my typing just plain stopped. I switched to a running copy of "top" and saw that X was consuming 72Mb of RAM which is eons more than it usually does. I have a swap daemon set up which adds more swap dynamically in the event of OOM condition nearing. The daemon had added an extra 32Mb swap file. I checked running processes and saw the xscreensaver was running out of control. The screensaver in question is the "teevee" one which simulates a television with the vertical hold off kilter and the screen wrapping around, plus interference fuzz, and similar. While it is a cute screensaver, it would have OOM'd my machine had I not been cautious and running swapd. ;o) This may be exploitable I suppose.. I haven't looked into it though.
This is fixed in the current package. From the xscreensaver changelog: 3.24: Added -ignorant option to maze hack. ... Fixed a bad leak in xteevee. ...