Wow!
A few months ago, I submitted a bug report to X.org to get them to add
an option to limit the amount of ram the Xserver would attempt to allocate.
Your solution is a totally different way to handle the problem, and from
the looks of it, it seems like it should work just fine. That is,
assuming the Xserver properly deals with failed malloc requests.
I'll give it a try, and if it works out, I'll add it to the startx script.
Thank you,
Jim McQuillan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ondrej Valousek wrote:
Hi all,
Just FYI that I have solved the nasty problem with X server crashing
once it consumed all available memory on the client.
I just added those lines at the beginning of the "startx" startup script.
XMEM_RESERVE=20000
MEMFREE=`grep MemFree /proc/meminfo | awk '{print $2}'`
XMEM=$(($MEMFREE - $XMEM_RESERVE))
echo "**** X sever limited to ${XMEM} kB RAM ****"
ulimit -v ${XMEM}
It did not solve the problem source, but at least X server (and users
whole session) survives.
It would be nice to see something like this in the next version of LTSP.
Happy new year!!
Ondrej
Jim McQuillan wrote:
Ondrej,
Your observations of Firefox and X.org are spot on.
When you quit from firefox, the Xserver will release all of the memory
>From the X.org guys that i've talked to about this, they say it's all
firefox's fault, because the Xserver doesn't know whether firefox is
still needing those resources.
I hear occasional rumours that there is (or will be) an option in X.org
to limit how much ram can be allocated. Then, a well behaved app should
be able to pay attention to the error returned from the allocation
request, and deal with it properly, rather than crashing the Xserver.
I'm at the Ubuntu dev conf, and we've got X.org guys and Firefox guys
here, so i'll try to corner them, to see what we can do.
Jim McQuillan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Ondrej Valousek wrote:
Jim, Jason,
I have done some more testing and here are the results:
- visiting some web pages in firefox (like the one Jason mentioned)
results in X consuming much more memory (50% in my case - I have 256Mb
on clients)
This memory is immediately released once you close firefox. I assume
this is a normal behaviour
- I tested several X servers connected via XDM to a logon box (RHEL 4,
Gnome) and used certain applications like gpdf (try to scroll up and down):
Xorg 6.8.2 builtin LTSP 4.1.1 - X growing constantly and memory is *not*
released even after you quit the application. The client eventually crash.
Xorg 6.8.2 shipped with RHEL 4 - same problem
XFree86 4.3, Suse 9.0 - same problem
XSun, Solaris 8, Sun Ultra 5 - unable to replicate the problem (was
working like a charm)
So I think this must be a bug in the Xorg and Xfree86 servers as I was
not able to replicate this with Xsun X server.
I saw some discussion and there is a bug in Xorg 6.8.2. causing memory
leak when using Xcursor animated themes. Should be fixed in RC2.
I do not want that much - only a stable environment that does not crash
randomly.
Ondrej
Jim McQuillan wrote:
Jason,
I don't have any solid formula for setting the size of the swapfile.
I've found that just going with 64mb of swap has solved any problems
that I've encountered.
As for "all situations", i'm sure there's a point where you could run
out of ram, even with 64mb of ram and 64mb of swap.
Jim.
On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Jason Maas wrote:
Hi Jim,
On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Jim McQuillan wrote:
There's just no getting around the fact that the Xserver is going to
consume memory. And for the most part, it's not X's fault, it's the
applications. the Xserver allocates memory on the apps behalf, and most
apps don't tell the Xserver to release the memory when it is done with
it.
Thanks for the explanation, it's very helpful for someone like me who's not
familiar with the nitty gritty details of X.
So, for now, we have the NFS-Swap safety net, which is better than
having the Xserver croak.
Definitely! So does NFS-Swap prevent X from getting nuked in all situations?
Do you have any recommendations from your experience regarding RAM, swap, or
total combined memory size?
Thanks so much for all of your hard work on LTSP, it's a fantastic project!
Jason
--
Jason Maas
DiscipleMakers Systems Dept -- www.dm.org
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