Comment 20 for bug 353800

Memory leak fixed on my machine. NOT completely, but the change is DRASTIC compared to what I was seeing before.

For testing, I opened firefox which had 12 tabs, system monitor, nautilus, terminal with transparency, and evolution. I also ran glxgears and I am seeing 500-600 FPS more! glxgears is now up to 1500-1600 on HD3400 Series.

I booted with Xorg at 65mb, after running these applications and glxgears. Also maximizing and minimizing each window repeatedly since this clearly showed the leak the most, Xorg is freeing up memory and garbage collecting quite well! Xorg is now at 76-77mb. Open is firefox with 5 tabs and system monitor. Normally before, Xorg would be at 130-170mb at least after this. Especially after minimize and maximize so many times. So at this point, an 11-12mb increase after all that is VERY acceptable compared to before.

Anyway, what I did was this...

I downloaded the official driver from ATI's website. 9.4 catalyst.

I followed the instructions to install the drivers manually from the link below line for line;
When I built the packages I had the previous driver still installed from envyng. I also left compiz running with all my desktop effects enabled. I'm not sure how relevant that is, but it is what I did.

This is not for the faint of heart! Be cautious and patient, READ CAREFULLY and follow the instructions word for word! If you mess this up, ubuntu will more than likely not be bootable into the GUI after. If something is wrong, ubuntu will freeze at boot probably with some messed up crap on the screen. You will have to remove the fglrx packages from the recovery terminal. (which happened to me once already).
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Jaunty_Installation_Guide#Installing_the_drivers_manually

After installation was complete, I did not reboot immediately.
I backed up first /etc/ati/amdpcsdb and then removed it from that directory.
Then I rebooted...

After reboot, i DID NOT do aticonfig --initial OR aticonfig --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf. And I don't plan on it.

My xorg.conf is a mess at the moment and not complete, but I attached it anyway since the video card driver settings I am using are there and are complete. But I've read that without running aticonfig --input, the ati driver doesn't read the xorg.conf settings. Not sure one way or the other right now honestly. But I'm not running it.

Anyway, Good luck!