Hello, I'm CCing my friend, Modestas Vainius, who told me about gpdf's uncanny ability to make X eat lots of memory. Perhaps he could provide some useful information. > I'm sorry it has taken a little while to get back to you. Oh, don't worry. I am very happy that you are helping me. > Well, you could try using a different X display driver. There are two > possibilities: > > 1) vesa > 2) fbdev I have just booted on VESA. I was surprised that it was completely painless -- 1024x768 with 32-bit colours worked out of the box. Anyway, I can still make X hoard memory by opening a large file with gpdf. I have also tried to boot kernel 2.4.25 (instead of 2.6.8, which I'm running now), just in case, but the result was absolutely the same. I did not try fbdev, because I had trouble with the framebuffer on this laptop and framebuffer support is disabled in the kernel. Anyway, as far as I understand it the idea here is to make sure that the bug is not in the i810 driver. > If you can reproduce your resource leak problems with either or both of > these drivers, then I strongly suspect a problem in the hardware-neutral > parts of the XFree86 DDX implementation (which I think is mostly stubs), or > the DIX portion. But then the big question is, why don't other people notice this? If it's in a generic layer, the problem should be visible everywhere. > Thanks for your indulgence with my proposed experiments, and I'm sorry they > did not mitigate or rectify the issue. Well, it's the least I can do as I *really* want this problem fixed. By now I have developed a strong feeling that I'm on something that is either expected behaviour or a result of a personal tweak. Maybe the resources should be cleaned up some time after the program using it is gone? The problem did not solve itself for me though. Actually in other systems I have seen X use lots of virtual RAM after extended periods of uptime, but the resident portion was never that large. It also does not seem to get swapped out easily. I am also very uncomfortable that the only quick and reliable way to reproduce this is with gpdf. It could be a bug in gpdf, or maybe in both X and gpdf that causes the problem. I think that it might be a good idea to try X.Org and see if the problem persists. I will try booting the Ubuntu (hoary) live CD tomorrow which runs X.Org and see if the problem manifests itself there as well. -- Gintautas Miliauskas <gintas@akl.lt>
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