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

[Peter Hutnick]

Bryan Field-Elliot said:
> 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!

As I understand it this includes memory usage of all child processes as
well.  You said you aren't running any other "desktop" apps, but does that
mean you aren't running a window manager (and desktop)?

If, for example,  you are running KDE or Gnome with a taskbar full of
applets I'd say you are getting off easy at 100MB.

Try commenting out all of your xinit stuff so that X comes up to the black
and white "texture" screen with the big X cursor, switch to a VT and run
top (and press M) and see if you like the results better.

X is a pig, though.

VNC comes with a very light X server . . . you could run it and the
SVGAlib vncviewer :-)  (You wouldn't get any HW acceleration though.)

XFCE is a nice, light WM.  http://www.xfce.org/  It might give you CDE
flashbacks, though.

-Peter