Possible memory leak in XFree86

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I am cross-posting this to -current, since the problem is occuring in that 
environment.

I first noticed this as far back as 5.0-RELEASE, but I had chalked it up to 
being hardware-related, for reasons I shall get into shortly.  The problem 
has persisted throught XFree86 4.3.x (and through the most current snapshot 
available in the ports).  I am also running KDE 3.x (3.1.x and now 3.2 
BETA2).  I am running -CURRENT (updated within the past couple of weeks) on a 
Pentium III-600mHz with 383MB (from dmesg) RAM.  Originally, I had an nvidia 
Riva TNT2 video card.  For a brief time I used the nvidia drivers, but those 
were so unstable I never found out if this particular problem was 
reproduceable with them. I now have an ATI Radeon 9200 and I see the same 
things.  

What is happening is that the X server slowly allocates more memory until all 
physical RAM and page space are allocated, and the pager starts killing off 
processes, eventually killing the X server.  This seems to screw up syscons 
as well, and  I wind up having to reboot to get my text consoles back.   
Things have gotten slightly better of late, sometimes the memory is freed and 
the XFree86 process might go from say 400+MB (according to top) down to a 
little less then 200MB, which appears to be normal for the Radeon using DRI.  
But this is not always the case.  When I come in in the mornings I either 
find my system very low on page space, or if I am gone for a couple of days I 
will generally find that X has been killed.  I run screensavers and have DPMS 
set up to send the monitor to power-save mode. I have reduced my screensaver 
to just blanking the screen, but still to no avail.  This morning, I came in 
(after having been out yesterday) to find that X had been killed after 
running out of page space.

Now, here is why I initially thought it was hardware related (that is, in the 
nvidia driver for XFree86): at home I have a Pentium III-600 with about the 
same amount of memory, running XFree86 4.3.x, KDE 3.1.x, screensavers, DPMS, 
etc.  The differences are that at home I have an SiS ViRGE video card 
(incidentally, PCI versus AGP for work), and I am tracking -STABLE there.  
Only every once in awhile do I run out of page space at home, but my paging 
space is undersized there, whereas at work it is set to the recommended size 
from when I did the install, 753MB. 

Where I am at now is trying to figure out where the memory is going, and how 
to prevent it. :) Can anyone help me diagnose this?
- -- 
Jonathan Fosburgh
AIX and Storage Administrator
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, TX
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