Michel Dänzer wrote: > On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 00:42, Nirmal Govind wrote: > > Hi.. I've noticed that the XFree86 process on my ibook is taking up a > > decent chunk of memory and some CPU and this seems to be slowing down my > > machine a bit .. when I do 'top', XFree86 is a process that's constantly > > at the top of the list.. > > X server memory consumption is a FAQ and has recently been discussed > here, but the X server should normally never hog the CPU (and it doesn't > here) unless there are clients flooding it with requests.
Of course, notice that the Xterm (or worse, kterm etc.) you're running the top command in _is_ flooding the X server... :-) (I've actually measured this some ten years ago -- the result (on *that* old system, your mileage will be totally different I'm sure) was that top+xterm took 10%-20% cpu. top itself *still* takes ~2% cpu on busy systems (lots of processes), and the Xterm situation has not considerably improved either, I feel confident in saying). Segher