X server memory footprint growing continuously and monotonically over time

[Omari Stephens]

Joel Feiner wrote:
> I used to think that too, but when I've had the same problem, xrestop 
> shows considerably less memory usage than the amount of memory in the X 
> server's heap (via /proc/<PID>/maps).  Firefox is a big offender when it 
> comes to triggering this behavior in X.  Sometimes I get that behavior 
> after only a few hours of using Firefox when visiting sites with lots of 
> images.  All my RAM is used up and I go into swap.

Joel was more right about this than I knew.  After running out of memory yet 
again, I killed firefox.  Which took me from
$procmap.sh 29998
   PID    VSZ DEVMAP LIBMAP  ALLOC    RSS  CMDLINE
29998 1276960 278848 543520 454592 686368  /usr/bin/X11/X -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp

to

$procmap.sh `pidof X`
   PID    VSZ DEVMAP LIBMAP  ALLOC    RSS  CMDLINE
29998 879664 278848 588388  12428 373588  /usr/bin/X11/X -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp

This despite that xrestop told me that firefox was using ~100 megs for pixmaps. 
  To be more clear, before closing firefox, I had 200 megs of memory free (after 
having closed something else).  After  closing firefox, I suddenly had 900 megs 
of memory free.

procmap is the script I grabbed from [1].

[1] http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/forum/2003-April/003370.html

--xsdg