Interestingly I also have this problem, but with an nVidia card (NVIDIA Coporation GT215 Quadro FX 880M rev a2) in my Thinkpad, using the nouveau driver!
I'm using kubuntu 12.04, upgraded step by step from Lucid, and this problem happens since going to 12.04. First I had the nvidia driver installed, and ran into the memory leak and 100% CPU for xorg. After fiddling around with it more without fix, I removed (apt-get purge) the nvidia driver. I looked through the alternatives and could not find any nvidia-related stuff anymore. Yet, even with nouveau this happened. Then I re-installed all things nouveau and mesa, but still this problem happens. I also installed the nvidia- firmware package (which was missing before), no help. At the beginning Xorg takes about 20M of memory, slowly growing. It uses almost no CPU at this time (about 4% of a core occasionally). When it reaches about 70M it suddenly jumps to 100% CPU (one full core). -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to nvidia-graphics-drivers in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/787859 Title: Xorg memory usage/leak Status in “nvidia-graphics-drivers” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: For some reason, with nvidia-current (270.41.06) installed, Xorg uses around 600M of ram when just started, with an idle desktop. No effects or anything enabled. Also, it seems to leak memory as after some use, its memory use goes up to around 1G, at which point the system gets horribly slow. Still later, when the entire 2G of ram and 6G of swap are used up, the system crashes. I.e., not really usable. Now, when i manually install the 270.41.19 driver, this reduces memory use somewhat, with an idle desktop just after starting its down to 80M. But after some time and use (firefox etc open) this easily climbs back to 500M but doesnt seem to leak anymore. Kubuntu 11.04, 2.6.38-8, x64, 7600GT To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/787859/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
