X.org Is Eating All My Memory

Quantumstate · 04-27-2006, 09:09 AM

Having a memory leak problem with X.org. As the day goes on, and I use apps like Konq and Gimp, my swap fills and fills, until I all memory and swap are full and the disk goes into a frrrennnzy. I shut down X.org to KDM, log in again, and swap is empty... for a few minutes. I have to restart X.org every day or so.

At first I thought it was just a problem with v6.8.2, so I upgraded to 6.9, and then 7.0, but still the same problem.

I first thought that it might be caused by some application since I'm using a lot of Konq windows and tabs on this machine, but even with few I have to start X every day or so because getting short of memory. Sometimes I'll start an app which consumes all of of swap, then shut it down, and it actually seems to have freed up alot of swap that had been consumed before it was started!

If you're not having this problem, maybe you do not use a Linux desktop much?

Running Debian Sarge on a 1GHz IBM notebook with 500MB. This morning in Ksysguard, Xorg VmSize is 221,548 and VmRss is 112,752. Kaffiene and Gimp VmSize each consumed over 130,000, so they are definitely leaking, and Gimp only had the tools and Levels open! But Xorg is the main problem.

Is it possible for something to leak into X.org?

mikeyt_333 · 04-27-2006, 10:49 AM

Can you post what a top shows when your swap is full? I am running KDE right now, with Xorg 6.9.0, and that's all I run in, yet I don't experience the problems you're describing, I've been running for about 4 hours now, and my swap is at 172k used. If we could figure out which process is hogging the resources that might lead to a solution...

Mike.

Quantumstate · 04-27-2006, 11:38 AM

Sure. Here's the top of my top. I'd rebooted earlier, so swap is only half-full. However Xorg has decided to consume 100% of my CPU time now, so I have to log out and restart X.

I wish it broke X.org into components.

Code:

top - 09:35:08 up 1 day,  3:48,  1 user,  load average: 1.24, 1.50, 1.77
Tasks: 132 total,   2 running, 130 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 95.4% us,  4.0% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.7% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    513488k total,   507020k used,     6468k free,       16k buffers
Swap:   613360k total,   306648k used,   306712k free,    78604k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 4192 root      25   0  222m 123m 1684 R 84.9 24.6 230:23.86 Xorg
 4462 carl      15   0 79208  36m  14m S  7.3  7.2  32:18.42 konqueror
 4391 carl      15   0 42264 9788 6124 S  4.3  1.9  87:51.74 kicker
 4460 carl      15   0 33900 4720 3256 S  0.7  0.9   0:29.68 konsole
 3885 hal       15   0  3756  872  640 S  0.3  0.2   3:45.87 hald
 4358 carl      15   0 36880 8196 5816 S  0.3  1.6  14:10.40 kded
 4399 carl      15   0 43332  17m 2212 S  0.3  3.5   3:51.83 kpowersave
 4481 carl      15   0 50024  10m 4452 S  0.3  2.1   2:24.34 konqueror
 4629 carl      15   0 70832  37m  15m S  0.3  7.4   8:12.67 konqueror
16062 root      16   0  2212 1108  832 R  0.3  0.2   0:00.07 top
    1 root      16   0  1604  244  212 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.95 init
    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.06 ksoftirqd/0
    3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.72 events/0
    4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper
    5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
    7 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:03.53 kblockd/0
    8 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid

Andersonian · 08-16-2007, 11:59 PM

I have a somewhat similar problem. One of my PCs runs Kubuntu and if I open a few graphical applications and run them for a while, all the RAM (256MB, old comp) and swap gets filled and the system just crawls. Killing X is the only, temporary, solution. Don't recall what version X, the default that comes with Feisty. nVidia videocard with the nvidia supplied binaries.

My main desktop has a nVidia card as well. Having 2GB of RAM, it never really gets used up by Xorg. However, if I just lock the screen overnight, then on some days in the morning I find the GUI completely unresponsive (even restarting X takes long) and ssh-ing remotely reveals that Xorg (1:7.2-5) is using ~100% of CPU power.

I have no clues what could cause these problems. Nvidia had a few threads about memory leaks, but those were older versions. Now I have the 100.14.11-1 nvidia-kernel-source.
switching kernels from 2.6.18-4 to 2.6.22-1 had little perceivable effect.