Xorg memory leak on Debian unstable (sid)

[planck_length]

Running VirtualBox on host Windows 7 64 and guest Debian Unstable (Sid) 64, all up to date (using latest VBox and guest additions)

For a number of weeks I've had a memory leak in the Xorg process running under KDE. Sometimes it only takes an hour and nearly 2G is used up, even though all I'm running is Konsole and emacs. Only restarting KDE (and therefore X) gets rid of the leak.

I don't know if this is a VBox problem or something else.

Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

[Perryg]

Only restarting KDE (and therefore X) gets rid of the leak.

There's your answer. Seriously I see this on metal and have for a while. Better than it was a few months ago but still annoying. If it were a VirtualBox issue you would need to reboot the guest to free up the memory.

[planck_length]

There's your answer. Seriously I see this on metal and have for a while. Better than it was a few months ago but still annoying. If it were a VirtualBox issue you would need to reboot the guest to free up the memory.

Thanks for replying, but isn't it possible that there's a bug in one of the guest addition drivers used in the X server? I posted a bug report about it on the Debian bug tracker and they suggested it was a VBox problem...How can diagnose it and determine it one way or another?

[Perryg]

You could use sysinternals on the host but it is going to tell you what you already know. I do run Linux as a host I know for sure that it has memory problems concerning Xorg, Compiz, and the DT manager. It seems that everyone want to blame the other when you see these things, but I can tell you from my experience that there is a real problem with the Linux end of it even if they don't want to deal with it.

For instance my main host is running Ubuntu and Unity. I used to, with version 11.04 have to log out daily and reboot every third day to clear the memory problem. With 12.04 I only need to logout about every three days and reboot is not needed. I have another Debian SID host that I need to do the same thing with since they switched to Gnome3. These are not Virtualized but on metal.

As for your request for a tool in the Debian guest you can use valgrind to check for memory leaks in Linux.

[planck_length]

As for your request for a tool in the Debian guest you can use valgrind to check for memory leaks in Linux.

I tried running valgrind a few days like so:

# valgrind --trace-children=yes --leak-check=yes /etc/init.d/kdm start

but kdm didn't seem to run when I did this (maybe because I'm running an init script?)

Do you know what command I need to type to get it to work?