Xorg Memory Leak
 

Hello,

Xorg is currently sitting at 11% memory use on my N900; not exactly a great thing. I tried killing Xorg the other day, to see if it would restart the process, but instead my phone decided it was time to reboot (reloaded the entire kernel). Is there a way to restart Xorg without completely rebooting the phone?

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

Before going to details I would like to ask you that:
Do you know what Xorg is?
Do you know what memory leak is?

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

Yes, Xorg is the graphics server for any standard Linux distribution.

A memory leak can be noticed when an application continually uses more memory and does not release it properly.

In my case, Xorg uses more and more memory as time goes by, and becomes slower and slower. I have restarted hildon-desktop quite a few times, but Xorg has not released any memory.

I have the same problem on my Linux workstations, and I have to restart Xorg every 25-30 days because it ends up using 340+ MB of ram (from the 70-80MB of ram it starts at), despite restarting my window manager.

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

What are you using to obtain Xorg memory statistics?

I have a few machines with 100+ days uptime running Xorg, memory usage is not even 50% of the values you have.

Applications can reserve as much memory as they want, this doesn't mean they are actually using it or wont release it if the need arises.

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

So far I have just been looking at conky and htop to see how much memory Xorg has been using.

Right now my phone is barely responding, the UI is barely responsive, I will need to restart my phone soon, as that clears up this issue every time.

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

What have you installed?
maemo-list-user-packages
Lists all packages installed by you. You can put list e.g. here: http://pastebin.com/

Have you done any tweaking?
Have you replaced system files/services like hildon-desktop?

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

It seems to be strongly related to the themes used with hildon, switching themes causes Xorg's memory usage to skyrocket.

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

If you have time then could you document this to here:
https://bugs.maemo.org/

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

Xorg most probably does not leak by itself, but applications leak into Xorg.
If applications use server-side pixmaps to store graphics, they appear in Xorg's memory statistics, instead of the application's.
So it's not Xorg to kill, but the misbehaving application.

Re: Xorg Memory Leak
 

Would it really be worth my time finding the exact situation where this issue can be reproduced? I thought future maemo development was dead.

So, in theory, closing all my applications and killing hildon should resolve the issue, but I tried this, and ended up with higher Xorg memory usage after restarting hildon. It seems to be that Xorg is holding on to the memory it had reserved for use.