Possible memory leak in nvidia drivers?

[Tomasu]

I seem to be seeing a slow memory leak in the nvidia drivers, as far back as some of the 169's iirc. I've been running KDE 4.1 and svn-trunk for a while now, and have noticed X continually eats up more and more memory, and won't free any of it till X is fully restarted. I end up with X using 800MB+ Virt, and 300-400MB RES ram, and restarting KDE didn't help, I had to CTRL+ALT+BS or use the kdm restart script to get the memory back (even though no X apps besides kdm were running, X wouldn't free most of its used ram).

I've attached a compressed nvidia bug log if it helps any (generated after running for a little while, after restarting X)

edit: if theres a better way to help diagnose it, running extra programs, let me know

edit2: forgot to mention, I'm currently running the 177.70 drivers and seen the same thing with the 67 and 68 drivers.

[kernelOfTruth]

confirmed !

I've seen this kind of behavior, too

you see it most obviously if you're running an compositing-manager (compiz(-fusion), kwin of kde4, ...) for a very long time with loads of animations (open-, close-animation, etc.)

then the resource usage e.g. will go up from RES: 107m -> 178m

switching to a non-compositing window-manager makes it somewhat better but this isn't an option if you're dependent on compositing,

also re-launching compiz doesn't help

the only "solution" so far seems to be to kill X and/or restart X and unload and reload the nvidia module then it's as fast as from the start

any ideas from the nvidia-developers; AaronP, ... ?

can you reproduce this ?

many thanks in advance

[TheBlackCat]

I'm seeing the same thing, although I don't know exactly when it started.

[spion]

the problem went away for me after disabling vsync and using a correct value for pixmapcachesize.

[kernelOfTruth]

Originally Posted by spion

the problem went away for me after disabling vsync and using a correct value for pixmapcachesize.

what do you mean with 'correct value for pixmapcachesize', please ?

many thanks in advance

[spion]

oh and i forgot something, i also added this to my "/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc"

export QT_NO_GLIB=1
nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1

correct pixmapcachesize i mean the following: lots of ppl suggest various settings for it, for example 2000000, i used that, but then i thought.. hmm isnt that too high for my 128 mb ram? so im using 70000 now, and this is much better.


initialpixmapplacement=2 does the following: it trys to fill your video ram before it touches your systemram, so _maybe_ if you set the pixmapcachesize higher than your videoram (in conjunction with pixmapplacement=2) , after some while it starts to fill up your systemram to, but just forgets too release it again, so that the memory usage is slowly growing....

i have no clue if this is right or whatsoever maybe im completely wrong even at the basics...

[kernelOfTruth]

Originally Posted by spion

i have no clue if this is right or whatsoever maybe im completely wrong even at the basics...

oh, don't bother

I'll give it a try & let you guys know if it helps

if it improves things you were on the right track

hmm isnt that too high for my 128 mb ram? so im using 70000 now, and this is much better.

just to be sure: that is seventy-thousand, correct ?

thanks

[spion]

ya i meant seventy thousand(70.000), but i found another typo, i didnt mean 2.000.000 , i meant 200.000

[TheBlackCat]

Originally Posted by spion

correct pixmapcachesize i mean the following: lots of ppl suggest various settings for it, for example 2000000, i used that, but then i thought.. hmm isnt that too high for my 128 mb ram? so im using 70000 now, and this is much better.

So how do you determine the appropriate pixmapcachesize for a given amount of video RAM?

[kernelOfTruth]

ok, @nvidia:

after 14 hours and more of operation with compiz-fusion and disabled animations it only consumed 10 mb more 107 -> 117 mb so there definitely seems to be a direct correlation between consumed memory and amount&time animations in the compositing window-manager was used