I am seeing reallly strange things going around here!
First, I have switched off the VM. That cleaned up the RAM usage. The status line showed 3.1G - 500 MB = 2.6 GB. Correct.
Then I closed that memory hog Opera, which was close to 400MB. Status line showed 2.6GB - 400MB - 2.2GB. Also correct.
That is, the
decrease was correct. With Xorg accounting for 500 MB and a handful of other processes, I never reach 2.2 GB when I add up all those.
But now the next thing: I read the link in dtl131's post:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... +bug/98783. This is reporting a bug of Xorg using more memory when Okular was used.
BTW my machine uses the ATI driver, not NVidia
So I tried this:
Started Okular and loaded a PDF of 43 MB. That increased the memory use of Xorg from 550MB to 600MB (give or take a few MB). After closing Okular, memory was not reclaimed.
So I opened Okular again, with again that file of 43 MB. But this time I browsed slowly through almost all pages, giving Okular time to render. Now the memory increased to 842MB for Xorg. But the strangest thing of all is that wiht each page I flipped,
the swap space was DECREASED with an almost equal amount as Xorg memory use was increased
When closing Okular again, memory was not reclaimed either, neither did the swap usage change.
This is the screen dump. Note that Opera and Virtualbox are gone here. Also see the decrease in swap usage from this post as compared to the previous post.
I am using xorg 1.7.7-13
jlinkels