Comment 11 for bug 910539

I don't think this is an issue with a hardcoded constant in X, not unless someone recently made it much smaller. I hadn't seen this problem at all in 15+ years of using Linux/X, not until upgrading from 10.04LTS to 12.04LTS.

More likely it's a newly introduced resource leak in X or gnome.

I'm using the nVidia driver.

I hit this yesterday and had to log out/restart X, and I'm already hitting it again today.

After killing everything except a single terminal and this instance of Firefox I notice out of 244 root window children over 160 instances of this sort:

     0xc001b9 (has no name): () 238x196+842+518 +842+518
        2 children:
        0xc001ba (has no name): () 236x164+1+27 +843+545
        0xc001bb (has no name): () 238x196+0+0 +842+518

They're all children of the root window. There are some duplicates, for instance (ignoring their 2 children):

     0xc01660 (has no name): () 1077x1052+850+154 +850+154
     0xc016b1 (has no name): () 1077x1052+324+118 +324+118
     0xc017ea (has no name): () 1077x1052+850+154 +850+154
     0xc01877 (has no name): () 1077x1052+850+154 +850+154
     0xc018fb (has no name): () 1077x1052+850+154 +850+154
     0xc01947 (has no name): () 1077x1052+850+154 +850+154
     0xc019cc (has no name): () 1077x1052+850+154 +850+154
     0xc01a45 (has no name): () 1077x1052+850+154 +850+154

I used to think it was xscreensaver, but I disabled that. I have no screensaver process running now. The only "strange" thing that might be related is a shell script I run that fires off xplanet every 5 minutes to generate a jpeg and then calls
  gconftool -t str -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename <file.jpg>
to update the background image.

> xlsclients
john gnome-session
john gnome-settings-daemon
john gnome-panel
john gnome-fallback-mount-helper
john rainlendar2
john polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1
john devilspie
john gtk-window-decorator
john notify-osd
john gdu-notification-daemon
john telepathy-indicator
john indicator-applet
john gweather-applet-2
john indicator-applet-session
john indicator-printers-service
john evolution-alarm-notify
john gnome-terminal
john firefox

Any suggestions on how to debug this would be appreciated.