[kde-linux] kwin needs 300M?

[Duncan]

Alex Schuster posted on Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:25:46 +0100 as excerpted:

> Jerome Yuzyk writes:
> 
>> After upgrading to 4.6.5 on Fedora 15 I see that the kwin process is my
>> largest memory-hog  - 323M so far. I saw this right after upgrading and
>> figured it was the Desktop Effects. I disabled them, and still see kwin
>> at the top of my Ctrl-Esc System Activity list, above VMWare and
>> Firefox. For a window manager?
> 
> I'm away from my desktop, so I cannot check now. According to mys logs,
> kwin uses about 40M. But it has a memory leak, after some days the
> typical usage is 600M, and it goes even higher - the record is 1.4G. I
> also notice strange effects when the memory usage gehts high, like
> disappearing or distorted window title bars. It's time to log out and in
> again then.
> 
> This still happens with 4.7.3 on Gentoo Linux.

FWIW, I used to see that back in the early kde 3.5.x compositing days, 
back when the composite extension was still new to xorg as well, but I've 
not seen it in ages.

OTOH, I can't use the gallium drm driver (r600g) at all, I'm stuck with 
the radeon classic drm driver (r600, the card's an rv730, Radeon hd4650, 
but with an AGP bridge as I'm on an older 3-digit dual dual-core Opteron 
290 system, still reasonable performance, but pre-PCIE, so AGP it is, and 
those AGP bridges are notoriously unstable on Linux/xorg), as the gallium 
driver hard-lock crashes just as kwin seems to take over.  I can sort of 
limp along for a few minutes if I set kwin to xrender, but even no 
effects in opengl mode, system hard-locks.  But even xrender mode is 
highly unstable with the gallium driver, probably due to plasma effects, 
etc, and the system tends to lock in a few minutes, regardless.

But the classic driver is quite stable, at least with kms (I've not used 
UMS in some time and am not sure I could remember how to configure it 
all) and has been since I reported and got fixed some issue back in 
2.6.35 or so.

So it would appear some hardware still triggers a memory leak, tho for me 
it was fixed years ago, with kde 3.5.7 or 3.5.8 or so, AFAIK.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman