[lug] X is a huge memory hog, why?

[Bryan Field-Elliot]

Hi folks,

I'm running RedHat 9 on a system with 1GB RAM. I'm trying to pare down
memory utilization of running processes, and to my surprise I found X to
be the biggest offender. With no other desktop apps running, X hovers
around 95-100 MB of memory!

A "ps" of the process shows this:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      3094  2.3  2.5 106672 25776 ?      S    02:46   0:57
/usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xauth vt7

I'm not sure the difference between VSZ and RSS (is RSS the actual RAM
used, vs. virtual RAM in the swap file?) Either way this seems terribly
wrong, can someone confirm that this either looks correct or looks way
out of line?

Thank you,

Bryan