[plug] XFree86 - ridiculous memory consumption

[Craig Ringer]

> 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.

OK, I'm using the nv drivers here at work on a TNT2...

   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
24145 root       7 -10 77372  27M  6728 S <   0.7  8.6   1:51 XFree86

I had to go hunting for that line deep under all the soffice.bin and 
mozilla-bin entries (I'm working on our terminal server at work).

On a total aside, wouldn't it be nice if ps & top understood linux 
threads and could hide everything but the parent thread of a threaded 
process?

> Well, the NVidia drivers work fine on the GForce 4 but tend to crash
> under heavy load when used on the TNT2.

Aha. I went from a GF2GTX to a GF4MX recently, maybe its partly because 
of that that I've been getting better behaviour out of the drivers. For 
a while I was starting 2 X servers by default, one with TV-out enabled 
and one with it disabled (not needed now that IceWM has Xinerama 
support). I could never do that earlier.