How to disable/limit pixmap cache in X

Daniel Stone daniel at fooishbar.org
Wed Sep 19 01:34:19 PDT 2007


On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 10:02:17PM -0500, Jim Kronebusch wrote:
> It appears that the ability to cache pixmaps to RAM is not a necessity and rather a
> feature to help speed up image access.  So I joined this list to see if anyone knows of
> a way to say limit in X the amount of pixmap storage available to applications, or how
> to even prevent them from caching pixmaps at all.

Um.  If someone says 'put this image into a window', you need to know
_which image to put_, which requires the server to store the pixmap, at
least temporarily.  If this is undesirable, you could patch the
applications to just free the pixmaps as soon as they're done using
them, or (in Firefox's case), just to not leak gigabytes of the bloody
things.

Limiting pixmap storage will mean your apps will just get horribly
confused and exit immediately, which is probably not what you want.

So, either way, the answer comes down to 'look at the app'.  (Or, 'don't
use Firefox'.)

Cheers,
Daniel
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