Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > >> This problem is not specific to Firefox. Perhaps a better long term >> approach is to address how memory is allocated in the X server. If >> traditional malloc heap memory is used (brk()/sbrk()), then it is >> difficult to recover the memory. If the memory is via anonymous >> mapping then memory can be entirely reclaimed once it is no longer >> referenced. If the X11 server can detect that the client no longer >> needs the memory, then it can be returned to the OS. It seems likely >> that a statistical garbage collector can be implemented to return >> memory to the OS when VM is running low. >> > > Xorg uses pure libc malloc(). Xsun will use mmap() for larger pixmaps, > so that the memory is returned to the OS, but we had to cut back on how > much of that we do in the past because the huge number of page table > entries generated by that was hurting Sun Ray scalability. >
So this won't "recover memory" in the sense of the Xorg server actually shrinking its memory footprint, but it will reuse its memory and not grow as much if pixmap caching were less aggressive, right? Do you have any clever suggestions for tuning that could help reduce the overall system impact of the X server? -Bob
