[lug] x server memory usage and indirect xscreensaver memory leak

[Neal McBurnett]

My machine was running very slowly because I was using a lot
of swap space because my X server process was using 120 MB of
total memory.  Well, I had been running it for 56 days....

I watched the size for a while with

      while true; do
	     ps -o s,uid,pid,ppid,vsz,stime,tty,time -p11729 | grep -v UID
	     sleep 30
      done

and started deleting processes, and discovered that xscreensaver was
tying up about 77 MB of X server memory.  Looks like a memory leak there
(I ran in 'random' mode, so it could be any of the screensavers....)

[redhat 7.1, xscreensaver-3.29-3]

The screensaver itself at the time was using very little memory
(perhaps 3 MB).

My question is, is there a better way to track down this sort
of problem?  E.g. a command to query the server to find out
which connections are using how much memory?  Or a simple data
structure to look at with gdb on the X server?

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
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