swap space usage increases

[jlinkels]

Hell no! I rebooted this machine 22 days ago, and that was already the second time in 3 months!

I have read up about this bug, and frankly I doubt it. Debian Stable is outdated, but I am running Squeeze now and this bug should have been resolved some time ago. OTOH I admit that the description matches very much what I see.

By your advice I already planned to reboot the machine, maybe even this week
I'll report back when I did.

Thanks so far.
jlinkels

[vbrummond]

I tested KDE in virtualbox using the vesa driver. If I open a huge pdf my xorg process inflates to 160mb used. If I close okular it returns to using 30-40 like on a fresh boot. So the memory does de-allocate using Debian Squeeze, and it is not a 'general bug' but a more specific one.

[dtl131]

Debian Stable is outdated, but I am running Squeeze now and this bug should have been resolved some time ago. OTOH I admit that the description matches very much what I see.

stable/squeeze has a relatively old xorg-server (1.7.x).

[jlinkels]

This is what I did:
In /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf
I changed this line:

Code: Select all

options radeon modeset=1

to this:

Code: Select all

options radeon modeset=0

And in addition I added the boot parameter nomodeset while booting. The parameter was seen during booting according to
/proc/cmdline. Any way I can check kms was actually disabled?

Right after booting xorg memory use was 101 MB.
When I opened a large PDF file, during browsing and rendering, memory increased to > 500 MB.
AFter closing the file, memory use dropped to 211 MB
Then I opened another PDF and browsed until memory use was > 600 MB
(Those are PDFs 35-50 MB in size and contain a lot of bitmaps)
After closing this PDF memeory was released until the 211 MB mark

Swap space was untouched.

Let me see what happens the next few hours/days.

jlinkels

[jlinkels]

The memory hogging monster is back!

It went fine for a few hours. Then I opened LibreOffice Impress with a fairly large presentation and Inkscape with a drawing with several thousands of objects, did some work and closed them. When I looked again in KSysMonitor, Xorg had increased to 500+ MB. No swap space in use yet.

I know, I should have paid better attention, but I was concentrating on my work. Contrary to popular belief you can become quite productive using Linux on the Desktop, even for GUI orientend tasks

jlinkels

[vbrummond]

Well, not sure what could solve it then other than a different driver. My virtual machine with KDE has been running for a day and half now and it is still using 40mb for Xorg.

[jlinkels]

Good, an update:

The 1 GB machine got upgraded to 2 GB. Behaviour is much better. However, this morning I checked memory usage. Swapping has begun again. Xorg is using 550 MB. THe machine has been on for 6 days.

Then the 4 GB machine. Yesterday I made the stupendous error to open Inkscape on this machine. Uptime must have been 12 days. Then it started swapping. Nothing could be done anymore. Not even the mouse would move. Clock displays were frozen. I tried to log in remotely to check memory usage. Login never got beyond MOTD. Swapping went on continuously for 30 minutes , then I switched off the power. I can't find any other explanation as that an active part of xorg was swapped in and out all the time. What else could have been used all the time if all programs were inactive and could not accept any input. Unless the swap algorithm is flawed of course.

Now the 2 GB machine runs the NVidia display driver. The 4 GB machine runs the ATI display driver. Can we now rule out the the display driver is the culprit?

jlinkels