The GUI xrestop utility has been added to Fedora Core development. xrestop presents a 'top' like view of X resources. This utility can be used to determine what applications might be leaking X resources, or may be using a lot of X resources, all of which are stored in the X server, and thus affect the memory footprint of the X server - even though the resources belong to the applications themselves. Often, people look at the output of "top" or "ps" and mistakenly believe that the X server is using a horrendous amount of memory. The output of both of those programs is very inaccurate for the X server process, as the X server mmap's video memory, and I/O regions of the video hardware, ROM BIOSes, etc. all of which add into the memory shown by top/ps for the process, but which are not physical system RAM. This results in the mistaken belief that the X server uses a lot of memory, when in reality, the X server itself uses very little memory at all. Aside from the above problem, the other more frequent cause of the X server appearing to use a lot of memory, is applications allocating X resources. Some applications such as Mozilla, can use a LOT of pixmaps when viewing certain web pages, etc. which all end up stored in the X server until mozilla releases them or exits. If you visit a large webpage with hundreds of images, you'll quickly see your X server increase in size. Quit the web browser and you'll see the X server shrink again. Applications which leak X resources, end up causing the X server to bloat over time, until the application is killed - at which time the resources are freed. xrestop is a useful utility for tracking down X resource leakage problems and for helping both developers and end users alike to determine what exactly is causing their X server memory usage to increase. The overwhelming majority of all "my X server is leaking memory" bugs that get reported, almost always end up /not/ being X server bugs, but instead are applications leaking X resources, some of which are hard to find because they are part of the desktop environment itself, such as gnome-panel or similar. Please use xrestop when experiencing problems of this nature, to help pinpoint the true cause of the problems at hand, so that bugs can be filed to the appropriate buggy components in bugzilla. Now that there is a useful tool for helping track these types of issues down, please do not gang up on the X server with X resource utilization bugs. It is memory leak free, or we'd have to change the name of it to XMalloc86. ;o) /me runs to dodge the tomatoes Seriously though, please play with xrestop, and report any application resource leakage bugs you find in bugzilla. Thanks for testing! -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat _______________________________________________ xfree86-list mailing list xfree86-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xfree86-list IRC: #xfree86 on irc.redhat.com
