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UnixRocks

Member

Registered: 2016-12-07

Posts: 25  

Xorg Consuming RAM Over Time

Howdy, folks. I searched for answers on this and have not had success. I am still on Devuan Chimaera with MATE on my Intel NUC desktop and have noticed over the past few months that as I leave Devuan up and running Xorg continues to slowly consume more and more memory. It will do this until the system starts swapping constantly to do anything, which then forces me to log out of X to clear the RAM. I have a FreeBSD box here also running Xorg and MATE that does not exhibit this problem. Has anyone else here experienced this with Xorg on Devuan?

Hints on diagnosing and fixing this or where to find information on doing that are welcome. I am hoping there is a config directive for Xorg that will help.

If your answer is just to upgrade to Daedalus, there is no need to say that. That is planned but it is going to be sometime in late 1Q 2024 before I will have enough personal time to devote to that.

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“Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
-- Suzanne McMinn

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,581  

Re: Xorg Consuming RAM Over Time

Hello:

I suggest you install xrestop to see exactly what is going on and maybe find the source of the issue.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xrestop/

That said, do you by chance have conky running?
If so, it could be causing a memory leak.

Check here.

Best,

A.

UnixRocks

Member

Registered: 2016-12-07

Posts: 25  

Re: Xorg Consuming RAM Over Time

Thanks! I will look into xrestop.

No, I do not use conky. Thanks also for the URL.

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“Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
-- Suzanne McMinn

UnixRocks

Member

Registered: 2016-12-07

Posts: 25  

Re: Xorg Consuming RAM Over Time

This is disappointing.

****@devuan-nuc:~/work$ xrestop -d 5
xrestop: Unable to open display!
****@devuan-nuc:~/work$ echo $DISPLAY
:0
****@devuan-nuc:~/work$ xhost +
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host
****@devuan-nuc:~/work$ xrestop -d 5
xrestop: Unable to open display!

Also tried that as root in a terminal shell, same result. Looks like I need to figure out why that is not working.

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“Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
-- Suzanne McMinn

stopAI

Member

Registered: 2023-04-04

Posts: 186  

Re: Xorg Consuming RAM Over Time

This is disappointing.

What if you try it by simply typing it in the terminal

xrestop

It works fine for me

UnixRocks

Member

Registered: 2016-12-07

Posts: 25  

Re: Xorg Consuming RAM Over Time

But of course I was doing it wrong. I was trying to use -d like one does with top, which is obviously not correct for xrestop. Working now. Thanks!

Note to self, RTFMP.

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“Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
-- Suzanne McMinn

UnixRocks

Member

Registered: 2016-12-07

Posts: 25  

Re: Xorg Consuming RAM Over Time

I believe I found the culprit for the RAM growth. Check out wnck-applet here:

I see that Chimaera is still on MATE 1.24.1:

$ apt-cache policy mate-panel
mate-panel:
  Installed: 1.24.1-1
  Candidate: 1.24.1-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.24.1-1 500
        500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

My FreeBSD box that is not showing a memory consumption problem is on MATE 1.26.2, so I hope and suspect an upgrade to Daedalus will solve this.

Last edited by UnixRocks (2023-12-24 18:50:16)

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“Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
-- Suzanne McMinn