Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.eng.convex.com!newshost.convex.com!newsgate.duke.edu!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!news.belwue.de!news.uni-stuttgart.de!uniol!uni-erlangen.de!winx03!news From: job@linpc9.sari.fh-wuerzburg.de Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Memory exhaustion w/ XF86 Date: Thu, 04 Jul 1996 21:04:17 +0200 Organization: University of Wuerzburg, Germany Lines: 51 Message-ID: <31DC15B1.F93@linpc9.sari.fh-wuerzburg.de> References: <4rdilc$etg@winx03.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de> <31DAD90A.1B92@www.play-hookey.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: linpc3.sari.fh-wuerzburg.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (WinNT; I) Ken Bigelow wrote: > > 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? > > > > 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. > 16 MB may be I should be more specific: the problem is not insufficient main memory. during a session with heavy bitmap working, like webbrowsing, the bitmaps are cached inside the Xserver, the cache memory is then never being released by the server. Observing the memory consumption is very easy with the top command. top showes the memory usage of every program and the disk cache useage in percent. On the other hand, I started some tests with other image processing tools, like xv. xv for example doesnīt store much bitmaps inside the X server at all, just 500 k (it rarely goes over 1 mb or so). of course this bitmap memory isnīt freed either. So, when doing a lot of netscaping, the x server growes in the core larger and larger and after a while no more processes can be forked due to exhausted virtual memory. (some month ago I was running linux, Xfree 3.1 and netscape on the same machine, there have not been these problems of growing X servers at all...) Said again, reseting the server is not the solution, since xdm is running and restarting the server again and again after logging out automatically. But maybe there is a command line option to the x server, which forces him to release cache memory (but I do not think so, since I have read the X Docs carefully, did I?). So, help is still appreciated, Hans