xorg is eating up memory

[Boerny]

Binary package hint: xorg

i have two Kubuntu Karmic installations, one on a desktop pc (2GB RAM, intel Core duo 6400), another on a laptop(Touchsmart Tx2 1300). I have on both the same problem that xorg process is eating up memory.
On the pc the nvidia-driver 190.42 and on the laptop the latest stable fglrx driver.
After start up xorg uses about 35mb of RAM. Then goingly quickly up when it uses more than 1GB the pc gets slow.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Nov 24 01:05:10 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
MachineType: System manufacturer System Product Name
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: xorg 1:7.4+3ubuntu10
ProcCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-15-generic root=UUID=8d2bbdb8-cd3c-473f-bb03-4db898a62953 ro quiet splash
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 LANG=de_AT.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-15.50-generic
RelatedPackageVersions:
 xserver-xorg 1:7.4+3ubuntu10
 libgl1-mesa-glx 7.6.0-1ubuntu4
 libdrm2 2.4.14-1ubuntu1
 xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.9.0-1ubuntu2
 xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.12.99+git20090929.7968e1fb-0ubuntu1
SourcePackage: xorg
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-15-generic x86_64
XsessionErrors: (npviewer.bin:28603): Gtk-WARNING **: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/engines/libqtcurve.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
dmi.bios.date: 01/30/2007
dmi.bios.vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
dmi.bios.version: 1102
dmi.board.asset.tag: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
dmi.board.name: P5B
dmi.board.vendor: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
dmi.board.version: Rev 1.xx
dmi.chassis.asset.tag: Asset-1234567890
dmi.chassis.type: 3
dmi.chassis.vendor: Chassis Manufacture
dmi.chassis.version: Chassis Version
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnAmericanMegatrendsInc.:bvr1102:bd01/30/2007:svnSystemmanufacturer:pnSystemProductName:pvrSystemVersion:rvnASUSTeKComputerINC.:rnP5B:rvrRev1.xx:cvnChassisManufacture:ct3:cvrChassisVersion:
dmi.product.name: System Product Name
dmi.product.version: System Version
dmi.sys.vendor: System manufacturer
fglrx: Not loaded
glxinfo: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
system:
 distro: Ubuntu
 architecture: x86_64kernel: 2.6.31-15-generic

[Boerny (b-stader)]

Why was the bug renamed to nvidia-graphics-drivers-180 (Ubuntu)?
As i described i have the behavier on a non NVidia machine too?

[eeos support (support-eeos)]

Same problem here:

kubuntu 9.10 64 bit.
NVIDIA QUADRO FX 1600M

the xorh line in top is:
1492 root 20 0 885m 545m 12m S 22 6.8 33:34.19 Xorg

here are cpuinfo and lspci for the graphic card:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X7900 @ 2.80GHz
stepping : 11
cpu MHz : 800.000
cache size : 4096 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 2
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
bogomips : 5585.37
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X7900 @ 2.80GHz
stepping : 11
cpu MHz : 800.000
cache size : 4096 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 1
cpu cores : 2
apicid : 1
initial apicid : 1
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority
bogomips : 5585.97
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

$

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro FX 1600M (rev a1)
        Subsystem: Dell Device 019b
        Control:...

[eeos support (support-eeos)]

It seems to affect Xorg in general when using NVIDIA drivers but also some ATI drivers. Many people are complaining on IRC. Please assign critical importance (it compels people to reboot or crashes on some systems).

[eeos support (support-eeos)]

The driver I am now using is 190.42 recompiled with opengl 32 lib included.

[Boerny (b-stader)]

i run xrestop on a Kubuntu with desktop effects enabled (Kubuntu 9.10 kernel 2.6.31-16-generic #53 x86_64 with nvidia 195.22) and on another with desktop effects disabled (Kubuntu 10.04 kernel 2.6.32-7-generic #10 x86_64 with radeon xorg driver).

On both machines xorg was eating up memory. I ran xrestop on both and saw that pixmaps uses a lot of the memory.
On machine with 9.10:
xrestop:
 Display: :0
          Monitoring 48 clients. XErrors: 6
          Pixmaps: 498688K total, Other: 99K total, All: 498788K total

top:
top - 21:14:34 up 2:10, 2 users, load average: 0.16, 0.22, 0.25
Tasks: 186 total, 3 running, 183 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 6.3%us, 9.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 83.5%id, 0.6%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2057468k total, 1921664k used, 135804k free, 64636k buffers
Swap: 8096664k total, 474000k used, 7622664k free, 192704k cached

May be this could be a hint?

[Boerny (b-stader)]

Looks like the bug exists longer than i thought
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/98783

[Boerny (b-stader)]

When plasmoid are loading data xorg memory goes up.
I use two micro blogging plasmoids. Before they do a reload of their data xorg used about 94 mb. After they refreshed their data, xorg was using 220mb.
After some minutes top says xorg is using 362m RES mem.
xrestop
pixmaps 148544K

when the plasmoids refresh again:
top 476 RES Mem
xrestop: Pixmaps 211658K

after another refresh
top: 595 RES Mem
xrestop: Pixmaps 272511K

as the refresh rate of the plasmoids is 5min the memory is eaten up quite fast.

But the plasmoids are not the only "programs" showing this behaviour.

[Boerny (b-stader)]

Just tried the okular thing mentioned in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/98783 and when loading a 4.2 MB pdf file, scroll threw it, the mem usage of xorg increases from 37.2M to 119.8M. After closing okular the mem of okular is freed but not from xorg.

[eeos support (support-eeos)]

It seems that the use of bash for monitoring system processes, for example through top, does unreasonably exapnd xorg memory usage. It may be linked to bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/186354

Please assign importance critical because it does eat away resources and may make teh system unusable.

[Alan (alan-redhat-bugs)]

Description of problem:
[RHEL5.3] Xorg Consumes all memory

This problem is across a number of systems, about 15 machines, All use KDE.
It is possible to make some changes on some systems.

What we found out so far is that the machine with the new nVidia driver consumed all memory again.

Machines with Vesa drivers are OK so far but the user of that workstation claims that it usually takes some time till it the phenomenon occurs.

This case is about one customer who has some sites worldwide.
All sites run with same configuration under Sun ULTRA20 M2 Workstation,with nVidia Video card.

About 15 of his systems experience this phenomenon worldwide.
We tried on one machine to update to a newer nVidia driver, and on another machine to use Vesa driver.

It is very problematic for the customer to work with Vesa drivers since he needs to use 1600x1200 screen resolution, and we couln't run this system with such resolution using Vesa driver.

After analysing his sar data of workstation with nVidia driver we found out that Xorg begins to consume alot of memory when the user is not working during evening hours.

We configured one of the problematic machines to use Vesa drivers,today on that machine Xorg consumes 1.4GB of memory.

We configured another machine to use Vesa drivers with an ATI card to make sure that nVidias drivers cause consumption of all memory.
(as mentioned previously, we couldn't use 1200x1600 resolution with Vesa driver and nVidia card)

In this case we've already seen that the problem reproduces also with ATI video card using Redhat's VESA drives, so this is not video card driver related problem.

The customer is currently preparing to deploy RHEL 5 within their organization.
The mentioned problem also reproduces on RHEL 4 systems.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

How reproducible:

It takes a very long time to see this problem
One thought about this bug:

 "how does xorg manage memory for quitting application" question:

12:42 < ofourdan|lunch> pamadio: you can always tell the X server to retain the resources, but that's for very specific use and hardly ever used - But if you want you can :)
12:43 < ofourdan|lunch> one of the use is to set a pixmap to the root window, the app that sets the pixmaps needs to specify thatthe pixmap must not be freed once the app terminates
12:44 < ofourdan|lunch> another use is to make an app to self-recover from a network disconnection. Although this is theorically possible, I am yet to find an apps that implement this :)

12:54 < ofourdan> pamadio: see "man XSetCloseDownMode"
12:55 < ofourdan> pamadio: by default all connections start in DestroyAll mode.

From alanm: I've never seen this in practice either.

Steps to Reproduce:

Customer s/w has to run for a very long time before this problem is seen

Actual results:
X.org Server consumes all memory

Expected results:

Normal operation of Xserver

Notes from SEG

This looks to be an issue that was supposed to have been fixed in the VESA driver

https://enterprise.redhat.com/issue-tracker/?module=issues&action=view&tid=81559
https://enterprise.redhat.com/issue-tracker/?module=issues&action=view&tid=83772

The pr...

[Boerny (b-stader)]

Still suvering from this Bug in Kubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS.
Every time i use Plasmoid MicroBlogging Xorg a huge amount of memory is used.
I tested it with three instances of the Plasmoid. On First update it uses about 50MB for ever instance. On every refresh new memory is used.
So that after a hour my memory usage for process xorg (in top) is by 1600MB and uses 30-50% of CPU.
xrestop says Plasma-Desktop is using about 600MB.

[Bartosz (bartosz-redhat-bugs)]

In my case this bug exists only when running KDE via nxclient.
If it switch to GNOME the memory leak disappear.

[RHEL (rhel-redhat-bugs)]

Development Management has reviewed and declined this request.
You may appeal this decision by reopening this request.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Boerny, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xorg-server REPLACE-WITH-BUG-NUMBER

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs

[penalvch (penalvch)]

OR using EOL release, and no response since 2014.