X memory usage?

[dragoran]

Mike A. Harris wrote:
> Kevin DeKorte wrote:
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>>
>> Matthew Miller wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 10:08:11AM -0600, Kevin DeKorte wrote:
>>>> Restarting the machine and loading the same working set and just using
>>>> metacity (composite still enabled) the VIRT RAM usuge is still high.
>>>> I'll try later with composite disabled.
>>>>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>>>>  2297 root      15   0  441m  43m  11m R  5.6  4.3   0:59.47 Xorg
>>> How much video ram does your card have? That's *included* in the number
>>> you're looking at.
>>>
>>
>> I have an i915GM video card (i810 driver) that is one of those shared
>> memory cards. I have an option set in xorg.conf to give is 128MB of
>> video RAM.
>>
>> grep -i RAM /etc/X11/xorg.conf
>>         VideoRam    131072
>
> The X server itself uses little memory.  The output of top/ps includes
> that, plus video memory, plus memory mapped I/O regions, video BIOS,
> etc.
>
> Applications allocate pixmaps which are stored in the X server, so if
> you run applications such as firefox/mozilla or other apps that allocate
> lots of pixmaps, these applications will cause the X server's memory
> footprint to increase dramatically.  If the application leaks pixmaps,
> the memory leak will be seen in the X server, not in firefox et al.
> while the _bug_ is in the app.  Once an app is killed however, the
> majority of the X resource memory usage should shrink.
>
> As a result, most of the time when a user sees the X server with high
> memory usage and thinks X is bloated and leaky, the truth is that some
> application such as firefox/thunderbird/evolution/nautilus or something
> else is bloated and/or leaky.  ;o)
>
> On a side note, I would recommend lowering the VideoRAM setting and
> seeing if you notice any difference whatsoever in performance of any
> apps (2D or 3D).  In general, X does not take full advantage of all
> of the memory in any video card, so allocating extra system memory
> to video in UMA systems like Intel graphics chipsets is likely to just
> waste lots of system ram which could be improving overall system
> performance acting as disk cache, etc.
>
>
>
>
for me it seems that the video memory has nothing to do with the X 
memory usage
2889 root      15   0  184m 140m  10m S    0  7.0   6:38.55 Xorg
note my card has 256MB Video ram and this is running on x86_64 + 
thunderbird/firefox/nautilus/gaim/xchat/gnome-terminal windows open.