Comment 16 for bug 914773

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Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt) wrote : Re: Compiz memory leak and blank screen unable to login

Thanks kayandus, that valgrind output is intriguing.

It would appear the two leaks are the result of a blockage in compiz event loop. I am guessing that after many hours, maybe your monitor has gone to sleep. And that is causing PrivateGLScreen::waitForVideoSync to hang inside either glXGetVideoSyncSGI or glXWaitVideoSyncSGI. I've never heard of an inactive monitor to cause such a hang, but it does sound plausible.

So while the monitor is inactive, unhandled events queue up in the compiz process. And it would appear even after the monitor wakes, the backlog of 1.5 million events is too large. So compiz appears to hang, or never catches up.

That's my theory, which I think is reasonable. If I'm right, then it's kind of a driver bug and kind of an architectural limitation (lack of threads) in compiz.

Could everyone affected by this kind of leak, particularly kayandus, please provide your graphics driver details? Are you using intel, radeon, nouveau, fglrx or nvidia?