DM wrote: > Today I clicked in firefox 3.0.6 (fedora 10 / gnome / yum-updated / amd64 / > 2GiB main memory / no swap) on > http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Www_Beo_cc.jpg > this URL: > http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Www_Beo_cc.jpg > > Download took quite long and the box' responsiveness was not as good > as usual... So I clicked the close-window box in the title of the > firefox window. The firefox window disappeared and the process, too. > But the box had just 10% free main memory now (usually 80% r free > after a fresh login); Xorg used 1.8GiB according to ps. > > So I installed xrestop, which told me that about 2 pixmaps (20MiB) > belong to an "unknown" process.
1. xrestop (and X generally) doesn't deal with processes, but clients. Is it possible that a client spawned a child process which inherited the X connection and still exists? The X server won't free resources until the corresponding connection is closed, which only happens when *no* process has a descriptor for the remote end of the connection. 2. 20MiB isn't significant; it's ~1% of your main memory. What is significant is that the X server needed to enlarge its heap, and is now keeping hold of that memory in case it needs it in the future. This wouldn't normally be a problem, as it will just get swapped out if it isn't being used. Except that you say that you don't have any swap. > Normally it takes a day until the Xorg process (VSZ RSS: 431952 88772 > --> 474472 123508) and other processes get too large. Then I log off > and in and everything is OK again. > > How can I avoid that logoff/login procedure? Add swap. Then, any memory which is allocated to the X server but isn't actively being used will get swapped out, allowing the physical memory to be used for something else. -- Glynn Clements <gl...@gclements.plus.com> _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg