Re: xfree86 is slowly consuming all of my memory
<quote who="Bryan K. Walton">
> Hello,
> I have a box running Debian testing with a 2.4.18 kernel. The
> box has 384MB of memory. Right now, my memory is almost totally used up.
> Here is a snapshot of the first few lines of top, sorting tasks by
> memory usage:
keep in mind that the memory usage includes the video memory usage
(at least it did in X3, i haven't seen anything that says X4 is different).
It is normal to have that amount of memory usage I think.
memory usage in X will increase(it doesn't free up everything) over
time as you open and close more apps, that is normal in my experience
too. I usually restart X once every month or 2 on my main desktop which
gets intensive activity. I have another machine running X which is
the opposite, it only has 1 app going and it doesn't recieve any mouse
or keyboard interaction, and has no window manager, it has been running
for almost a year without reloading X, and memory usage has been
constant.
I think you can calculate minimum video memory usage with this
formula:
H resolution * V resolution * color depth /8
so if your running 1600x1200 @ 24bit then do:
1600*1200*24 and divide the result by 8 to get the memory usage in bytes.
this number may not be perfect depending on the card and what features
you have turned on. it may not even be accurate anymore i remmeber
reading it on my graphic's vendor website(Number 9 Visual technologies)
about 5-6 years ago. And this is for 2D visuals only, 3D stuff makes
it of course go way way way up.
I don't think X takes all of the video memory into account when loading
X, I have installed a new videocard on friday or saturday which has
128MB of video memory but X's memory usage is only 135MB
in any case your memory usage looks pretty normal to me. normal
as it what I see on my machines.
nate
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