[plug] XFree86 - ridiculous memory consumption

[Cameron Patrick]

Hello all,

I've noticed recently that despite having a reasonable amount of RAM,
my system has been swapping quite a bit.  The culprit appears to be XFree86,
which is using 200-400mb.  Presumably this isn't normal behaviour. The
machine is running XFree 4.2.1 with two nvidia cards using the
standard 'nv' driver. 

I'm not sure exactly when I first noticed this happening - I might have
accidentally added Option "hog_memory" to my XF86Config file or something.

Anyone else seen this happen before, or have any ideas on what might be
causing this, and how to return X's memory usage to something a
little more sensible?

Cheers,

Cameron.

PS. I too have been enjoying LCA greatly.  In particular, Conrad's talk
about Scrubby was very entertaining and those of you who missed out are
strongly encouraged to kick yourself :)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

In case it helps someone:

cameron at erdos:~$ top
top - 21:10:06 up 13:52,  3 users,  load average: 0.57, 0.31, 0.17
Tasks:  84 total,   1 running,  83 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):   3.9% user,   2.3% system,   0.0% nice,  93.8% idle
Mem:    516136k total,   498052k used,    18084k free,    23484k buffers
Swap:   634528k total,   319968k used,   314560k free,    31624k cached

PID   USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  Command           
 4001 cameron   18   0  2068 2068  640 S  2.6  0.4   0:00.57 rsync             
 4009 cameron   17   0   956  956  752 R  1.6  0.2   0:00.14 top               
 4002 cameron   14   0  1664 1664 1224 S  1.0  0.3   0:00.33 rsh               
  419 root       8 -10  694m 379m 113m S  0.7 75.2  12:27.54 X
  478 cameron   10   0  1304 1116 1024 S  0.3  0.2   0:47.31 ssh               
    1 root       8   0   448  416  396 S  0.0  0.1   0:04.09 init              
(snip)

cameron at erdos:~$ free
              total        used         free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        516136       500736        15400          0      24572      42756
-/+ buffers/cache:       433408        82728
Swap:       634528       327132       307396

erdos:/home/cameron# cat /proc/419/status 
Name:   XFree86
(snip a pile of random numbers)
VmSize:   715124 kB
VmLck:         0 kB
VmRSS:    343088 kB
VmData:   579832 kB
VmStk:       248 kB
VmExe:      1308 kB
VmLib:      1308 kB
(snip)