[ILUG] advice on X memory leaks?

[Justin Mason]

Hi all -- quick query --

The #1 problem I have, stability-wise, with my desktop machine nowadays,
is X chewing up RAM -- I mean look at the ram chewed up here:

  13942 root      17   0  162M  81M  4576 R       0 27.3 65.6  2094m X

That's 162 megs.  Even if I take out the 32megs for the Voodoo 3 card,
that's a lot of wastage.  The machine is swapping a lot more than it
should be, so this is mostly "real" memory, not video RAM ;)

This is after about a week since I last logged in. I run Helix' latest
Sawfish & GNOME, 8 gnome-terminals, Konqueror from KDE 2.0.1, and
occasionally Mozilla nightlies.  The server is XF86_SVGA from XFree86
3.3.6.

At a guess, I'd presume some of those apps have been chucking in pixmaps
and so on into the X server, then not cleaning up. tut, that's downright
windows-y.  Unfortunately I don't know enough about X to know if

  (a) I can get a listing of these cached blocks of memory, or

  (b) I can clean them up myself, in the same way one can use "ipcs" and
  "ipcrm" to clean up shared-mem droppings

Is there a way to do this, or will I just have to log out and log in again
every few days? :(

Is XF86 4 any better in this regard?  How is it in stability terms, in
general?

--j.