Still memory leak XVesa in V2.0?
Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: Still memory leak XVesa in V2.0?
started by: DSLfreak
Posted by DSLfreak on Dec. 06 2005,15:02
Hi all,a month now I am very pleased with DSL (started with 1.5). The only problem I have is a memory leak in XVesa. Since I can't use Xfbves on my very old machine (Pentium I 89 MHz with 67MB of RAM) which does not have this mem leak problem (according to posts in forums). I was wondering if V2 of dsl has solved this issue of leaking mem in XVesa. Any answers?
Testing it ofcourse is the answer, but I just do not want to mess up my tiny comp.
Thanks in advance!
Posted by DSLfreak on Dec. 06 2005,21:32
Hi all again,tested DSL-2.0 on another pc and indeed Xvesa still has the memory leak. Just open some shells and start "top" in them. From that time on the memory usage of Xvesa increases. After a few hours you can see quite a reasonable amount of extra memory used by Xvesa. Is there anyone who has the answer to this? Like I said, Xfbdev does not work on my PC.
Thanks again
Posted by roberts on Dec. 06 2005,23:04
When are we supposed to see such memory leaks.I have been running
watch -n 60 pmap 570 | grep -w total
where 570 happens to be the pid of the running Xvesa.
This has been running for over an hour and no leakage.
I have this running on two older machines a laptop and a white box, one a pentium and one a celeron. No leaks.
Maybe you have a memory leak on your machine?
Maybe your machine is not Vesa compliant?
Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 06 2005,23:19
The whole VESA memory leak issue has been discussed at the XVesa author's web site.In his opinion, the "memory leaks" are caused by the user's programs that are running and not releasing memory properly and are not caused by his program.
But these were old comments so maybe he has improved the situation since then. I dunno.
Posted by hawki on Dec. 06 2005,23:34
HiMemory leak? Maybe, maybe not. I run my systems for days,weeks, months without rebooting. If I use Xvesa it is not possible. They will freeze up after a few days. If I use Xfbdev I have no problems. If you run top every day or so you will see that Xvesa slowly consumes all available memory. I don't know if it is application specific but I have no such problem with Xfbdev. As the old joke goes "If it hurts when you do that, don't do that". So I don't.
Good luck
Posted by DSLfreak on Dec. 08 2005,10:44
Hi all again,yesterday I did some testing and concluded the following:
1) Xvesa with Fluxbox and some bash shells running "top" cause memory leak in Xvesa on my Pentium I 90 MHz/67 MB RAM and also on an AMD Thunderbird 700 MHz/384MB RAM
2) Xvesa with JWM does NOT cause memory leak in Xvesa, tested under the same conditions!!
Posted by clivesay on Dec. 08 2005,12:20
Maybe both of you should list applications you run often, we might see a pattern. I use DSL xvesa on my mp3server and it runs for weeks and weeks on 256mb ram. We had a power outage the other day so my uptime right now is only 7 days. I've never had it run and then lock.
Chris
Posted by roberts on Dec. 08 2005,16:50
Confirmed, running top in fluxbox using Xvesa percipitates the memory leak of Xvesa. This does not occur using jwm. Hey, I told you jwm uses less system resources.
Posted by clivesay on Dec. 08 2005,18:22
So this is really a fluxbox issue?
Posted by Your Fuzzy God on Dec. 08 2005,20:02
I had the memory leak problem up until this week when I finally got fed up enough to switch over to XFree86. This problem occured whether I ran top or not. In fact I hardly ever run top since I use QPS. I think almost anything can cause this leak, not just top. To test my theory I reset my machine right before I left work one Friday. I didn't do anything but let it load to the desktop. When I got back on Monday I had maxed out my swap and was running 92% of my physical memory (384MB total).I run v1.5, frugal, toram.
Posted by crusadingknight on Dec. 08 2005,20:35
| Quote (clivesay @ Dec. 08 2005,13:22) |
| So this is really a fluxbox issue? |
Technically, it seems to be an old fluxbox issue... I can't detect (after a long time) any such leaks in fluxbox-0.9.x
Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 09 2005,14:13
Some experimentation is recommended.Does turning off the dockapps (dsl noicons) help?
How about tweaking some of the fluxbox settings?
Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 12 2005,19:38
Here is some output from the "watchdog" line that roberts posted.Just hit the desktop, and opened 3 shells .
1. top
2. watch -n 60 pmap 454 | grep -w total ( xvesa )
3. watch -n 60 pmap 458 | grep -w total ( fluxbox )
Everything was fine for about 30 min, then the numbers began to change.
Fluxbox stayed at 3536k the entire time..
Xvesa shows me this.. ignore the last ones, as I was posting this.
dsl@box:~$ watch -n 60 pmap 454 | grep -w total
total 85312K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85108K
total 85236K
total 85236K
total 85236K
total 85360K
total 85360K
total 85360K
total 85476K
total 85476K
total 85476K
total 85476K
total 85604K
total 85604K
total 85604K
total 85732K
total 85732K
total 85732K
total 85860K
total 85860K
total 85860K
total 85980K
total 86028K
total 86492K
total 86492K
total 86584K
total 86584K
total 86584K
total 86696K
total 86696K
total 86788K
total 86788K
total 87004K
total 87004K
total 87036K
total 87052K
total 87052K
total 87052K
total 87052K
total 87164K
total 87164K
total 87164K
total 87272K
total 87272K
total 87272K
total 87384K
total 87384K
total 87476K
total 87476K
total 88820K
total 89540K
total 89672K
total 90352K
total 90620K
total 90680K
total 90680K
total 90704K
ke4nt
Posted by roberts on Dec. 12 2005,19:56
Yes, but run the same test using jwm instead of fluxbox and xvesa does not grow. It must be a ghost user who prefers fluxbox 
Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 13 2005,18:42
Interesting that it stayed stable for so long, then changed..I will continue to test various options..
"No Icons" , etc. did not change a thing for me so far.
Anyone tried mik's new fluxbox with the watch running ?
( I just saw a post above about it.. will test that as well )
73
ke4nt
Posted by ke4nt1 on Dec. 13 2005,23:55
I have tested with the fluxbox 0.9.14 provided by mikshaw.It also shows a XVesa leak when using it, so changing
the version of fluxbox used doesn't change my findings..
Using the XFree86, I see no leakage..
testing continues..
Kent