X server memory leak ? (Re: Announcing Fedora 7 Test 2 (6.91))

[Adam Jackson]

On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 08:46 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> Tomasz Kłoczko wrote:
> > Before refresh:
> >   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                 
> >  3253 root      16   0 1480m 845m 8148 S   12 42.0 787:18.00 Xorg             
> > 
> > After five time ctrl-r:
> >  3253 root      15   0 1480m 864m 8148 R    8 42.9 787:30.59
> > Xorg                                                                    
> > 
> > RES groves ~19MB. This png file have 1000x1000 pixels and X display
> > depth is 24bpp. 1000x1000x3 = ~3MB .. so looks like buffer for keep this
> > previous version of this files was not released.
> > 
> > Can you check this on your system using above scenario ?
> > Try to open gif/png file which will take big amount of memory in
> > uncompressed form (1MB or more).
> 
> And when you close the web browser what happens?  Chances are that the
> web browser is leaking pixmaps.  That's something not uncommon.

What he said.  Check firefox's resource usage in xrestop as you do this.
It's probably growing at about the same rate.

X is a server process, it can only do what its clients ask of it.  If
the client says "hey, here's a 30M pixmap, hold onto it for me", well,
that's what it'll do.

- ajax