*BSD News Article 72722


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From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Memory exhaustion w/ XF86
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 1996 13:33:14 -0700
Organization: Erols Internet Services
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Hans-Joachim Both wrote:
> 
> Did enyone of you made the same experience than me with
> XFree86 3.1.2 and Netscape 2.x (or 3 beta) under BSD 2.1.0
> 
> When running Netscape I noticed that all bitmaps are cached
> in the X server. This is a normal behaviour, of course, but
> after a while X takes more than 90 % of the physical core
> memory and leeds the system to trashing or even make it
> unable to spawn processes.
> 
> Ok, you may say, shut down the server and restart. The difficulty
> is that when running xdm a server restart with memory freeing
> is not possible as a normal user.
> 
> Has anybody a solution to this problem?
> 

How much RAM do you have? 8 MB is a bare minumum for X with an 
application like Netscape.

It is true that FreeBSD will use open RAM for caching, but it has always 
been nice to me about backing off for active applications. Your problem 
appears to be one of insufficient RAM, at least at first glance.

Ken