Re: application blows up X

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Michael Rothwell" <rothwell holly-springs nc us> writes:
> > Agreed, I thought "blows up X" meant "makes X use a lot of memory"
>
> I.e., "operate normally."

Not really accurate. If you look at X in top, it can include your
video card memory once or more in the memory total, due to mmap() of
that memory - this isn't real memory usage but can show up as 32 megs
extra or more. In addition, nearly all the X memory usage is caused by
resources that belong to specific X clients, i.e. the memory is used
by applications. Applications create server-side resources, remember,
since X is client-server. That is why a theme can make X big.

X is just not very memory hungry, but the mmap()'d video ram and the
fact that client resources are allocated by the X server process mean
that you can't really tell one way or the other using tools such as
top.

The iPAQ handheld runs a somewhat stripped-down XFree86 X server in a
couple megs of RAM. Remember that X was designed, oh, over 15 years
ago - it certainly doesn't require a cutting-edge computer to be
usable. I used to use it just fine on a 386 with 16 megs of RAM,
running Emacs which used 8 of the 16 megs all by itself.

(I do have a sense of humor, sorry to nitpick - I am just tired of
Slashdot posts on the topic "gee we should replace X" ;-)

Havoc