Excessive Memory Usage (Xvesa)

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: Excessive Memory Usage (Xvesa)
started by: Your Fuzzy God

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on Sep. 12 2005,16:02

Hey guys and gals,

I left my computer on over the weekend (1.5 frugal install). When I came back this morning I noticed that it is using 204MB of Physical Memory and 50MB of swap space. I ran top and found that 174MB of the allocated memory is going to xvesa. Why is X sucking up so many resources when left on? Is this an inherant problem with X or is there a way that this memory leak can be tracked down? I assume shutting down the window manager will free the memory, but the problem will still persist. Any suggestions?

--EDIT--
Restarting X did (of course) free 163MB of physical memory, but the swap space is still in use (but not necessarily by X).

Posted by hawki on Sep. 12 2005,17:18

Hi
Xvesa has a known memory leak in the version DSL uses. It will continue to grow until your system runs out of memory and freezes. I have stopped using it and use Xfbdev instead which does not have the problem.

Good luck

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 12 2005,17:46

What graphical applications do you have up and running on DSL?

The type of application may also have an effect on the XVesa memory "leakage"

Posted by clivesay on Sep. 12 2005,18:14

I just checked my mp3 server that only has ftp, vnc and edna running. Here is the surpising results. This is a Frugal install btw.

Code Sample

dsl@mp3server:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 255192 244640 10552 0 2912 199356
-/+ buffers/cache: 42372 212820
Swap: 0 0 0
dsl@mp3server:~$ uptime
13:06:32 up 6 days, 18:08, 0 users, load average: 0.95, 0.30, 0.10

looks like there is a leak happening.

Chris

Posted by mikshaw on Sep. 12 2005,18:38

Chris, that doesn't look too bad to me. You're actually only using 42mb...the other 200 are just cached.

Posted by undertow on Sep. 12 2005,19:34

fuzzy, you can track down the specific xserver that you need for your hardware and install it without installing the entire xfree package. ive heard many a folk say theyve loaded up a knoppix cd and yoinked the xfconfig and xserver being used and injected it into dsl. i was lucky to find this on the forums:
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....86_svga >
which happened to be the right one for my machine. might be the one for you...

Posted by clivesay on Sep. 12 2005,20:39

Quote (mikshaw @ Sep. 12 2005,13:38)

Chris, that doesn't look too bad to me. You're actually only using 42mb...the other 200 are just cached.

Well, dumb me. I guess I don't know what I'm looking at.

If that is OK then maybe there isn't an xvesa issue? As you can see that machine was up for 6 days.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Sep. 12 2005,22:24

There was a memory leak in some older versions in Xvesa, but I thought Robert fixed it.

I get no leakage on my DSL 1.5 install on my toshiba.

-J.P.

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on Sep. 12 2005,23:04

Nothing out of the ordanary is running on this machine. The only things that run that aren't default are smbd and nmbd. I also noticed that when I run firefox I get 4 "firefox-bin" files each taking up 22-23MB (Status=S, RSS=23M, command=firefox-bin). I doubt any of this has to do with the problem though.

I did a fresh install with 1.5 on this machine and have not messed with any display settings (other than running xsetup.sh). Xvesa should be as fresh as a daisy. I am so full of whoa and anguish, please help.

-Fuzzy :;):

Posted by adssse on Sep. 13 2005,04:20

I had a similar problem quite a few versions ago, where after being left on for a few days it would eat up all my memory and be unresponsive. At that point I just switched to Xfbdev, which has suited me just fine.