In my years of using Linux desktop (in particular, XFCE), I have never experienced memory explosion caused by Xorg server like what I described in this bug report. Please allow me to be a bit candid here. It seems like the newer versions of desktop software (which could mean one or more of these: Xorg, firefox, Libre Office, XFCE and/or MATE, ...) leads to significant bloat in memory usage. This is to the point that a very capable laptop (with >= 8 GB of RAM) would perform poorly because of memory thrashing today even when our usage pattern is not changed over the years (at least I feel so). I'll back this up below.
I still have a desktop computer running Debian 8 and XFCE. Here are some stats on that running system:
Hi Daniel, responding to your comment:
In my years of using Linux desktop (in particular, XFCE), I have never experienced memory explosion caused by Xorg server like what I described in this bug report. Please allow me to be a bit candid here. It seems like the newer versions of desktop software (which could mean one or more of these: Xorg, firefox, Libre Office, XFCE and/or MATE, ...) leads to significant bloat in memory usage. This is to the point that a very capable laptop (with >= 8 GB of RAM) would perform poorly because of memory thrashing today even when our usage pattern is not changed over the years (at least I feel so). I'll back this up below.
I still have a desktop computer running Debian 8 and XFCE. Here are some stats on that running system:
* up time = 31
*