[NTLUG:Discuss] Two Questions

[kbrannen@gte.net]

If you look carefully with "ps -elf", you'll probably find that "X" is 
growing, at least it does on my system (I've seen it at over 250M).  I boot 
into run level 3, then "startx"; this allows me to exit from X occassionally 
when I note (with xosview) that too much swap is being used.  Almost all the 
"lost" space is reclaimed.

IMO, the problem is applications creating pixmaps, then not releasing them, so 
the X server continues to store them.  Yes, sloppy programming, or else a big 
time leak in the X server. :-/  I notice that memory is "lost" faster after an 
hour or two of constant web surfing, hence my pixmap guess.  Not sure how to 
verify that though.  (Well, OK, I'd have to get the source to the X libraries 
and put some debug statements in to either print when a pixmap is stored and 
then removed, or else to occassionally run thru its pixmap cache and print 
what's there; that would [dis]prove my theory.  This is not likely to happen 
any time soon.)

BTW, I find this problem to exist on a RH 7.2 system, and Suse 7.3 & 8.0 
systems.  Considering it happens on 3 releases, and over a fair amount of time 
(long enough for the XF86 team to have done something about it; I conclude 
that sloppy apps are probably the problem).

HTH,
Kevin


TJ Davis wrote:
> As for the memory thing I am judging what is going on by using top. I 
> have a total of about 320mb of RAM (2 128mb sticks and 1 64mb stick).  
> When I first boot my system a total of about 100mb of that memory is 
> being used.  I log into the GUI and that bumps it up to around 120mb.  I 
> play around with a few apps for a couple of hours.  As I would suspect 
> would happen, I open an app and it takes up a few mb of memory.  As soon 
> as I close that app the memory is released.  I do this with a few apps 
> and then when the method stays the same I open OpenOffice and it takes 
> up it's 115mb.  However when I close it the memory that it was using 
> does not free up and that is a lot of memory to not get freed.  Then, 
> for testing purposes, I reopened it and BAM, there goes another 115mb 
> and now my swap partition is being used and I hate that cuz my little 
> ol' pIII 450 starts to creep.  Maybe I am badly misinformed but I was 
> always under the impression that when an app starts it is supposed to 
> request a certain amount of memory space and even request some while it 
> is running but then, when it closes, it is supposed to notify the system 
> that that space it "borrowed" is again available.  Again, I am using top 
> to judge all of this.  Is there another tool that might be better?
> 
> T.J. Davis
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Cox [mailto:cjcox at acm.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 3:40 PM
> To: discuss at ntlug.org
> Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] Two Questions
> 
> 
> TJ Davis wrote:
> 
>  > I have two questions that are totally unrelated.
>  >
>  > First of all.  I am using OpenOffice on RedHat Linux 7.3 at home and I
>  > have noticed that when I close it does not free the memory that it
>  > used (about 100mb worth).  Is there a command I can type or a program
>  > that I can use to recover this memory?  This is a real problem because
>  > if I close OpenOffice and then open it again then it takes another
>  > 100mb of RAM.  I thought that the system might recover it eventually
>  > but I left it running all night and this morning it was still 
> unrecovered.
>  >
> How are you mesuring the memory loss?  Could be that there is some kind
> leak... but would
> be interesting to see if the memory is associated with a process or if
> it's the kernel.