[plug] XFree86 - ridiculous memory consumption

[Leon Brooks]

On Wednesday 22 January 2003 10:37 pm, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> 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.

Depends on the card. I had a 16MB Banshee at one stage which "used 60MB of 
RAM", and what was really happening was that the 16MB of card memory was 
being mapped into RAM at three places to get access to it in 3 different 
ways, so the process was using 12MB plus 3 images of the card. Something 
similar may be happening to you. Normally, this would show up as the process 
having a fairly fixed RAM size not much more than a multiple of the amount of 
video memory available (normally 3x but some cards 1x, 2x or 4x).

If the RAM useage grows, suspect stuff like dud fonts, X plugins or helper 
modules etc leaking RAM. Try disabling various options and not-loading helper 
apps one at a time to see if that helps.

Cheers; Leon