[plug] XFree86 - ridiculous memory consumption

[Cameron Patrick]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 11:50:01AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
| 
| Does this memory usage slowly increase over XFree86's lifetime, or is it 
| immediately allocated on login? Try quitting all apps except your window 
| manager (especially OO.o, GIMP and Mozilla) and see if that brings your 
| RAM use under control. I've seen X's memory use somehow driven up by 
| other apps, usually the shared memory allocations but sometimes not. Old 
| mozilla versions loved to do this.
| 

Both :)  Around 150mb RSS at login, growing gradually to close to
a lot more once X has been around for a while and several apps are running.
The output of free that I posted yesterday was with Mozilla running with
about a dozen tabs open, plus a heap of xterms, and a gvim.  X shrunk
substantially after closing them.

Still, after X had been running for several hours and the only window open was
an xterm, it was using over 200mb real RAM.

| 
| I presume there's a good reason your're using "nv" not the NVidia 
| drivers. The NVidia drivers used to be dodgy (didn't like multiple X 
| servers running on the same hardware, didn't like APM, used to leak 
| memory, etc) but are pretty good now.
|

Well, the NVidia drivers work fine on the GForce 4 but tend to crash
under heavy load when used on the TNT2.  At one point I was using the
nvidia binary drivers for one card and the XFree drivers for the other
and it worked fine.  After a recent kernel recompile, I was too slack to
rebuild the NVidia drivers and changed back to nv for both.  I'll try
the binary drivers again when I get back from LCA tonight and see if it
makes a difference.

--CP.