Xorg is eating up my memory!!!

eantoranz · 05-31-2006, 08:20 AM

How can I keep Xorg from eating up my memory?

Look at this line from top:

Code:

4774 root      15   0  418m 104m 2304 S    2 43.0 176:28.43 Xorg

418 Mbs of VIRT!!! :-O

I'm not a gamer!!! Why is that happening?

Mizzou_Engineer · 05-31-2006, 01:32 PM

Xorg can reserve a lot of memory (that's what "virt" is.) It is actually using 104m in your setup. It's not exactly a lightweight application. But one thing that you have to realize is that Xorg's virtual and application memory figures also include the dependency libraries of Xorg too. Also, Linux likes to fill up the RAM with caches and buffers as it's a lot faster to read data from RAM than from a hard drive. A HDD will give you 30-60 MB/sec, while a modern computer's RAM will throughput 4.5-8 GB/sec.

Here's my Xorg setting from top:

17486 root 15 0 478m 406m 6504 S 2 20.2 42:46.95 X

I have even more virtual memory being reserved by X, and four times the actual application memory being used by X- over 400 MB. (I have a multihead setup that makes X use a lot of RAM.) One thing that you can do is to run the command "free -mt" to see how much actual RAM is being used by applications and is not just being buffered.