Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!batcomputer!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!alchemy.mcs.clarkson.edu!Valdis
From: Valdis@alchemy.mcs.clarkson.edu (Valdis Kletnieks)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Memory hemmorage in Xsun?
Message-ID: <1144@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>
Date: 5 Jul 88 17:45:25 GMT
Sender: nobody@sun.soe.clarkson.edu
Lines: 26

Has anybody seen this, or (hopefully) have a fix?

Setup: Sun3/260 with FPA, hi-res monitor running SunOS 3.5

Problem: The X11R2 Xsun server keeps sucking down more and more memory.
It starts off at around 1204K, and keeps growing.  Eventually,
whatever malloc (or whatever) it's doing fails, taking out Xsun.
At this point, the keyboard/mouse is hung big time, and requires a
reboot to reclaim.  The failure depends how soon it runs out of swap space,
and it can have grown to anywhere between 4M and 9M in size by that point.

It does this even if I am not starting up new programs.  All that is usually
running is 3-4 xterms, 3 xperfmons, xbiff and xclock, but the actual 
programs running don't seem to matter.

The only other cure besides rebooting seems to be to close down X when I
leave each night, and fire it up in the morning, and pray it grows slow
enough to survive the workday.

The next time I get bitten, I'll run adb on the dump, and maybe find what's
killing it.  Of course, chances are that it won't fail on the same allocate
that's causing the problem (which in fact is almost for sure a failure to
*DE*-allocate something)...

				Valdis Kletnieks
				Sr. Systems Programmer