xserver-xorg memory leak

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

This is just a probe to see if anyone else is having problems with
Xorg eating memory.

Every once in a while my desktop machine becomes unresponsive and top shows
that Xorg is using all my memory.

I was out of town and ssh'ing into my machine every day or so and it
was fine, except today I was running mutt on that machine and noticed
mutt got killed a few times -- and again Xorg was consuming all memory,
so I killed it.[1]

I see this bug:

    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=326956

And I do have a background script that loads a new root window image
every five minutes.  But, I don't normally notice that the memory
increases that much.  The machine (and Xorg) have been running for
about two months, so it's odd that all of the sudden it eats memory.

I just loaded an image 1000 times (using display -window root
test.jpg) and watched top, but no growth in memory.  This is what it
is like after that, which is normal:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                               
 5407 root       5 -10  105m  36m  73m S  1.3  4.1   2:21.97 Xorg

So it doesn't seem like it's my background image problem.

Any other ideas what might be the problem?

ii  xserver-xorg                          7.1.0-11                            the X.Org X server
ii  xserver-xorg-core                     1.1.1-15                            X.Org X server -- core server

[1] By the way, when I remotely kill xorg my monitors no longer are
controlled by dpms -- so they power on.  (when I came home my monitors
were indeed no longer in sleep mode.)  Can I remotely run startx or is
there a utility to remotely force my monitors to sleep mode when not
running the xserver?



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org