Q: howto find xorg leak?

[Daniel Pittman]

"D. R. Evans" <doc.evans at gmail.com> writes:

> This is slowly wearing me down, and I'd love to find a way to solve
> it:
>
> Running amd64 dapper, with KDE 3.5.5, xorg grows at the rate of about
> 300 to 400 MB of memory per day. After googling around, I discover
> that almost certainly this is not actually a leak in xorg, but in some
> program that is using xorg. But how do I discover which program? I
> have been through the system, killing all the obvious candidates
> (basically, the application programs that put stuff on the display),
> but the memory never seems to decrease; the only way to "fix" the
> problem is to log out and restart the X server.
>
> It gets pretty tedious having to watch one's memory usage all the time
> (I have programs that use > 1GB, and if I run a couple of those, and
> xorg has been in use for a few days, even my 4GB box gets maxed out),
> and having to reboot at least once a week just because memory is
> leaking in bucketfuls on to the floor.
>
> So, can anyone suggest a way to figure out which program is causing
> the leak?

You suggest elsewhere that you believe it is a resource leak from one of
the X client processes, and no one seems to have offered any direct
monitoring of X resource use yet.

I don't actually know if this helps with your application -- it may only
see the "live" resources, not the lost ones, but it universe is the
package 'xrestop'.

This shows resource usage per X client in a top-alike display.  It has
fairly detailed statistics and should, with luck, be able to help you
track down where the leak is.

Regards,
        Daniel
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