Xorg & compiz eats lots of memory

[markuz]

Binary package hint: compiz

When using xorg with compiz (that eye candy that ubuntu ships) half of my memory is used by the compiz.real process when I have 5+ hours working. Considering that I have 947 Mb of Ram it's a quite large amount. Even worse, if I switch to metacity the memory is not freed. It just get freed when I restart the X server.

You can see it here: http://flickr.com/photos/markuz/1909209234/

and here: http://flickr.com/photos/markuz/1908372961/in/photostream/

[Travis Watkins (amaranth)]

If switching to metacity doesn't free up the memory it's a problem with xorg. If switching to memory _does_ fix the problem you've probably got an nvidia card and are hitting an nvidia bug that makes it look like compiz is leaking.

[Andrea Corbellini (andrea.corbellini)]

This happens for me very often with nvidia drivers. I tried to switch RenderAccell to Off because this option has a similar bug, but none changed.
However, when switching to metacity if frees almost all the memory.

[Tristan Rhodes (tristanrhodes)]

I have seen compiz.real use 794 MB of memory on my 2 GB system!

When this happens, I go to "System>Preferences>Appearance>Visual effects" and choose "None". After compiz is shutdown, I re-select "Normal" and compiz.real starts up and only uses 18 MB of memory. Somewhere along the line, a memory leak or similar is causing compiz to waste 776 MB of memory.

FYI, I am using the Nvidia binary driver.

[markuz (markuz)]

There is a way to avoid the TONS of memory use, launch compiz with --indirect-rendering it should use far less memory (2% of my 946Mb).

Anyway, there is still the bug.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Nvidia bug.

[Dmitry Agafonov (dmitry-agafonov)]

I can confirm.
Fastest way to reproduce on 1Gb RAM & fully updated system (Gutsy): just to start slideshow in eog fullscreen.
System freezes after 1-2 minutes of flickering images...