[kde-linux] kwin needs 300M?

[Alex Schuster]

Duncan writes:

> 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.

I could try this, using the classical driver. Gallium seems to work fine 
here, well, except for OpenGL performance in games, Quake3 is not 
playable at all. But I don't have time for this anyway... I think this 
was also the case with the classical driver. It was working fine with 
the closed-source ati-drivers, but those seemed to have a memory leak, 
my system was swapping even more than it does now.

But I will not be home at my desktop for a while, so I cannot try this 
right now.

	Wonko