ps on many/most systems is completely useless for determining
X's memory usage.
X maps the display into its address space: sometimes the address
space required to do this is large/very large (it isn't just
the VRAM on the board, but also its register area, which can be
arbitrarily large).
On an alpha, for bad reasons, for example, it maps gigabytes of address
space, which is the extreme situation.
On my iPAQ handheld this instant it is 3 megabytes virtual, of which 1.5
megabytes is shared (e.g. libc, etc). The mainline XFree86 server is
somewhat bigger, and applications can ask the X server to store arbitrary
amounts of data on their behalf.
We should probably do an X extension to just report memory usage and
other statistics, and be done with this 15 year old FAQ (which is in
XFree86's FAQ's if I remember correctly).
- Jim
--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
Compaq Computer Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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