Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!SABER.COM!jimf
From: jimf@SABER.COM
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Server Does Not Free Widget Resources
Message-ID: <9012072211.AA18806@test4>
Date: 7 Dec 90 22:11:23 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 21

|What we find is that upon a widget's destruction, the X server seems to
|fail to release some of the widget resources as evidenced by the fact
|that the size of server grows with each widget's creation and fails to reduce
|correspondingly in size with each widget's destruction. The amount
|of server growth with each widget creation and consequent destruction is
|on the order of between 5-10 KBytes.

Under many (if not most) implementations of UNIX, it is impossible to
`shrink' a process (ie negative sbrk).  Thus your X server can grow
but will never shrink if you use such an implementation.

You often get this behavior on many systems where it *is* possible to
shrink a process because of malloc fragmentation.

Most often you'll find that the resident set size (RSS) of your server
will diminish when the resources are freed (because the pages aren't
being referenced) even though the process size does not.

jim frost
saber software
jimf@saber.com