Kevin DeKorte wrote:
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Matthew Miller wrote:
On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 10:08:11AM -0600, Kevin DeKorte wrote:
Restarting the machine and loading the same working set and just using metacity (composite still enabled) the VIRT RAM usuge is still high. I'll try later with composite disabled. PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2297 root 15 0 441m 43m 11m R 5.6 4.3 0:59.47 Xorg
How much video ram does your card have? That's *included* in the number you're looking at.
I have an i915GM video card (i810 driver) that is one of those shared memory cards. I have an option set in xorg.conf to give is 128MB of video RAM.
grep -i RAM /etc/X11/xorg.conf VideoRam 131072
The X server itself uses little memory. The output of top/ps includes that, plus video memory, plus memory mapped I/O regions, video BIOS, etc.
Applications allocate pixmaps which are stored in the X server, so if you run applications such as firefox/mozilla or other apps that allocate lots of pixmaps, these applications will cause the X server's memory footprint to increase dramatically. If the application leaks pixmaps, the memory leak will be seen in the X server, not in firefox et al. while the _bug_ is in the app. Once an app is killed however, the majority of the X resource memory usage should shrink.
As a result, most of the time when a user sees the X server with high memory usage and thinks X is bloated and leaky, the truth is that some application such as firefox/thunderbird/evolution/nautilus or something else is bloated and/or leaky. ;o)
On a side note, I would recommend lowering the VideoRAM setting and seeing if you notice any difference whatsoever in performance of any apps (2D or 3D). In general, X does not take full advantage of all of the memory in any video card, so allocating extra system memory to video in UMA systems like Intel graphics chipsets is likely to just waste lots of system ram which could be improving overall system performance acting as disk cache, etc.