It's been rumoured that Jonathan Corbet said:
>
> I've been messing with 1.3.5, trying to decide if I can really move my
> family finances over and also pondering a new LWN article. Things are
I still haven't seen the article, but I gather it was compilmentary.
Thanks.
> But...I've noticed that my X server seems to grow without bound while I'm
If its the X server, then its an X server bug. X clients have no
imediate or direct effect on memory management inside the x server.
The idea is security: no single x client, no matter how malicious,
is supposed to be able to crash or otherwise mess up the x server.
Normally, the x server malloc's memory to store pixmaps that the client
asked to have displayed. It allocs memory for fonts; lots of other
things. When a client goes away, that memory is 'reclaimed'. That
does not (necessarily) mean that X11 calls the free() subroutine;
instead, it keeps that memory and puts it in an internal pool of
available memory for reuse at a later time. In part, it does this to
avoid 'memory fragmentation' which is the memory analogue of
what happens to MSDOS file systems. So in fact, the x server may have a
pile of free memory inside of it; its just that the linux kernel & the
other memory reporting tools don't know/haven't been told this.
(BTW this is also why X11 is client-server: if an X11 client crashes,
the server is still there, running, and able to clean up after the dead
client. The down side is, of course, that the x server (like the
kernel) has to be 'perfect' and 'bug free'.)
-linas
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