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- Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!darwin.sura.net!sgiblab!nec-gw!nec-tyo!wnoc-tyo-news!scslwide!wsgw!wsservra!daemon
- From: dd@adobe.com (David DiGiacomo)
- Newsgroups: fj.mail-lists.x-window
- Subject: Re: FLAME, FLAME ON X!!!
- Message-ID: <1992Nov16.094002.10550@sm.sony.co.jp>
- Date: 16 Nov 92 09:40:02 GMT
- Sender: daemon@sm.sony.co.jp (The devil himself)
- Distribution: fj
- Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated
- Lines: 38
- Approved: michael@sm.sony.co.jp
-
- Date: 10 Nov 92 00:44:28 GMT
- Message-Id: <1992Nov10.004428.17556@adobe.com>
- Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
- References: <1683@igd.fhg.de>, <1992Nov9.235741.25166@dsd.es.com>
- Sender: xpert-request@expo.lcs.mit.edu
-
- In article <1992Nov9.235741.25166@dsd.es.com> pmartz@dsd.es.com (Paul
- Martz) writes:
- >In article <1683@igd.fhg.de>, baumann@igd.fhg.de (Peter Baumann) writes:
- >> [ ... ]
- >>
- >> Short after that, a colleague of the bad-luck guy occasionally
- >> remarked, "Did you know that the X windows server never releases
- >> memory space once acquired for image display? Each new image loaded
- >> makes the X server address space grow until there's no more available."
- >> And added, "This is a well-known bug of X". Well-known. Well...
- >
- >Care to tell us in which vendor's X is this a bug? I've certainly
- >never heard of it before.
-
- Paul, how disingenous of you.
-
- Peter Baumann is obviously referring to a common and unfortunate
- situation, in a garbled way. The MIT sample server allocates and
- deallocates pixmaps with C library malloc() and free() calls. In typical
- Unix C library implementations, free() never causes the process address
- space to shrink. Depending on the exact allocation strategy of malloc,
- and the intervening client activity, it's quite likely that a client
- displaying a series of images will cause the server to grow monotonically.
-
- The usual solution to this problem is to modify the server to allocate
- pixmaps (or at least large pixmaps) from a separate heap. If they are
- padded to page boundaries it is even possible to attempt to free swap
- space on pixmap deallocation, but the effectiveness of this varies among
- Unix VM system implementions.
-
- --
- David DiGiacomo, Adobe Systems, Mountain View, CA dd@adobe.com
-