My computer has recently gotten (even) slower. My system monitor says it's currently using 30% of the swap space. I checked what programs were using what, and by far the largest is X, at about 600 MB. Is X supposed to use that much? What can I do to make it use less?

I'm using Mandriva 2006 with Gnome 2.10.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Currently, my X uses about 234 MB with a bit over 100 MB resident, so that does seem to be something of a lot. Is all of that resident memory (open top, hit M to sort by memory usage, and look at the VIRT versus RES sizes) If you have a large number of windows open or are doing excessive graphics intensive work it might not be all that excessive. What all applications are you running? How long has X been running? If there's a memory leak in your version of X running it for long periods of time may cause excessive memory consumption (check for Mandriva patches/bugfixes).