Is my Xserver useing too much memory?
Hi, About a year ago I had a machine (since dismantled) that would reliably have an Xserver (XF4.x) consume all available memory and cause the system to be in an OOM state. Now in another machine I have a [1]Xserver using a lot of memory again. Earlier today, the SIZE of the process was about 64MB, and now it's up to 80MB. Is this normal? My system has been up for 7 days. Mike [1] PID USER PRI NI PAGEIN SIZE SWAP RSS SHARE D LC %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 709 root 15 -10 28607 81876 63M 16M 8520 3K 0 8.2 13.1 384:33 XFree86 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Is my Xserver useing too much memory?
Mike Fedyk said: > > Now in another machine I have a [1]Xserver using a lot of memory again. > Earlier today, the SIZE of the process was about 64MB, and now it's up to > 80MB. Is this normal? My system has been up for 7 days. highly depends on what your doing. My experience suggests that this is not abnormal. while at work I used to do a lot of intensive work in X and it would quickly jump to 100MB usage, then over a few weeks get to about 250MB at which point I would log out and restart X to free up resources(it would get noticiably slower until I restarted). keep in mind that the memory usage shown includes the memory on the video card. I am not sure if it includes *ALL* memory on the card or only the memory it is using(I think only memory it is using). I just checked my desktop here and it is using a rather obscene amount of memory, X is at 297MB[1]. and Its only been 3 days since I last restarted it. Haven't done anything too out of the ordinary either..*shrug* thats what 768MB of ram is for :) maybe I should turn on a swap partition. nate 7233 root -9 -10 297M 41M 5900 S < 0.0 5.4 35:30 XFree86 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Is my Xserver useing too much memory?
On Friday 01 November 2002 06:47 pm, Mike Fedyk wrote: > Hi, > > About a year ago I had a machine (since dismantled) that would reliably > have an Xserver (XF4.x) consume all available memory and cause the system > to be in an OOM state. > > Now in another machine I have a [1]Xserver using a lot of memory again. > Earlier today, the SIZE of the process was about 64MB, and now it's up to > 80MB. Is this normal? My system has been up for 7 days. > > Mike > > [1] > PID USER PRI NI PAGEIN SIZE SWAP RSS SHARE D LC %CPU %MEM TIME > COMMAND 709 root 15 -10 28607 81876 63M 16M 8520 3K 0 8.2 13.1 > 384:33 XFree86 You only need to worry if it continues to grow without bound over several weeks, which I would guess means you have a memory leak in part of the xserver specific to your video card. If you have a swap file/partition, this becomes not as important, as the leaked memory will eventually get pushed out into swap, and will never be called back in from swap. I have had leaky X video drivers before, but it would take months for that alone to fill up a large swap space. -jason pepas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Is my Xserver useing too much memory?
On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 04:47:00PM -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote: > Hi, > > About a year ago I had a machine (since dismantled) that would reliably have > an Xserver (XF4.x) consume all available memory and cause the system to be > in an OOM state. > > Now in another machine I have a [1]Xserver using a lot of memory again. > Earlier today, the SIZE of the process was about 64MB, and now it's up to > 80MB. Is this normal? My system has been up for 7 days. > > Mike > > [1] > PID USER PRI NI PAGEIN SIZE SWAP RSS SHARE D LC %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND > 709 root 15 -10 28607 81876 63M 16M 8520 3K 0 8.2 13.1 384:33 XFree86 I don't recall the details but I believe that the memory use of X (at least as reported by top isn't regular system ram but is related to the hardware in your video card. It's 3am so this probably doesn't make much sense but try googling for something "Xfree86 using too much ram" or something similar and I think you'll find that this has been discussed before. -- Ray -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Is my Xserver useing too much memory?
>From Mike Fedyk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 04:47:00PM -0800: > Now in another machine I have a [1]Xserver using a lot of memory again. > Earlier today, the SIZE of the process was about 64MB, and now it's up to > 80MB. Is this normal? My system has been up for 7 days. ---end quoted text--- FWIW - I had an experience where it was a poorly written program (my own:)) that leaked memory in the XFree86 process. I was mismanaging pixmaps. Rather than seeing the memory added to my process, it was added to X, and not removed when my process shut down. So I think it can also be a bad application or applet. You may want to think about what you have running. Monitor memory usage as you start up and shutdown some of the software you run. If the usage in XFree86 goes up, but doesn't come back down when you run and stop a particular program, be suspicious, particularly if it's a graphics program. On the other hand the amount that's being used doesn't sound out of line to me. Cheers, Steve -- \_O< \_O< \_O< ~~~ Steve Cooper Redmond, WA -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Is my Xserver useing too much memory?
On Sat, Nov 09, 2002 at 09:53:34AM -0800, Steve Cooper wrote: > start up and shutdown some of the software you run. If the usage in > XFree86 goes up, but doesn't come back down when you run and stop a > particular program, be suspicious, particularly if it's a graphics > program. Ahh, thanks. With libc6 and openmosixanalyzer I had a problem with it and Xfree86 competing for memory. I've switched back to libc6 2.2.5 to see if it happens again. Xfree86 was up to 150MB, but didn't get any bigger. On one system that I had a while ago, Xfree86 would easily get up to 400MB and more. You just had to wait long enough. Unfortunately that system is in pieces right now. Thanks for the tip. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]