New package added to Fedora devel: xrestop - GUI X Resource monitoring tool.
Andre Costa
acosta at ar.microlink.com.br
Wed Mar 10 02:37:29 UTC 2004
Cool, Mike, well done! Kudos to all involved, seems like a very cool
app... any ETA for it to appear among 'stable' Fedora packages?
Best,
Andre
On Tue, 9 Mar 2004 21:17:00 -0500 (EST)
"Mike A. Harris" <mharris at redhat.com> wrote:
> The GUI xrestop utility has been added to Fedora Core
> development.
>
> xrestop presents a 'top' like view of X resources. This utility
> can be used to determine what applications might be leaking X
> resources, or may be using a lot of X resources, all of which
> are stored in the X server, and thus affect the memory footprint
> of the X server - even though the resources belong to the
> applications themselves.
>
> Often, people look at the output of "top" or "ps" and mistakenly
> believe that the X server is using a horrendous amount of memory.
> The output of both of those programs is very inaccurate for the X
> server process, as the X server mmap's video memory, and I/O
> regions of the video hardware, ROM BIOSes, etc. all of which add
> into the memory shown by top/ps for the process, but which are
> not physical system RAM. This results in the mistaken belief
> that the X server uses a lot of memory, when in reality, the X
> server itself uses very little memory at all.
>
> Aside from the above problem, the other more frequent cause of
> the X server appearing to use a lot of memory, is applications
> allocating X resources. Some applications such as Mozilla, can
> use a LOT of pixmaps when viewing certain web pages, etc. which
> all end up stored in the X server until mozilla releases them or
> exits. If you visit a large webpage with hundreds of images,
> you'll quickly see your X server increase in size. Quit the web
> browser and you'll see the X server shrink again.
>
> Applications which leak X resources, end up causing the X server
> to bloat over time, until the application is killed - at which
> time the resources are freed.
>
> xrestop is a useful utility for tracking down X resource leakage
> problems and for helping both developers and end users alike to
> determine what exactly is causing their X server memory usage to
> increase.
>
> The overwhelming majority of all "my X server is leaking memory"
> bugs that get reported, almost always end up /not/ being X server
> bugs, but instead are applications leaking X resources, some of
> which are hard to find because they are part of the desktop
> environment itself, such as gnome-panel or similar.
>
> Please use xrestop when experiencing problems of this nature, to
> help pinpoint the true cause of the problems at hand, so that
> bugs can be filed to the appropriate buggy components in
> bugzilla.
>
> Now that there is a useful tool for helping track these types of
> issues down, please do not gang up on the X server with X
> resource utilization bugs. It is memory leak free, or we'd have
> to change the name of it to XMalloc86. ;o)
>
> /me runs to dodge the tomatoes
>
> Seriously though, please play with xrestop, and report any
> application resource leakage bugs you find in bugzilla.
>
> Thanks for testing!
>
>
> --
> Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
> OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
>
>
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--
Andre Oliveira da Costa
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