RE: X becoming a memory hog

[Craig Orsinger <orsingerc epg-gw1 lewis army mil>]

On 22-Mar-00 Poletti, Don wrote:
>> I've got several old sun ELCs with 4MB of RAM set up as B&W 
>> X-terms that
>> work fine for light use.  Though they do need an ocassional 
>> reset every
>> few weeks due to what I believe is a memory leak in the old 
>> Sun x-server.  
>> I've also got some old Sun 3/80s (Motorola 68030 @ 20MHz) with color
>> output and 16MB RAM configured the same way and get zero 
>> complaints from
>> their users.  Since all their apps run on a single headless 
>> system I've
>> managed to get quite a few additional years out of that old hardware.
>> 
> 
> I noticed that none of your examples are using XFree86. It may
> not be inherent to X but to XFree86 implementation. Anyone know
> if 4.0 uses less memory? 

        I'm running Xinside's Xserver on one of my systems, and it's
just about as large. The mention of those old Sun workstations brings
up another point, though. On Unix workstations I'm used to seeing 
8 bit color (or less, as in the case of the mono X stations above).
On PCs, most everything's 24bits these days. That means that some
things will be four times as big (X generally uses 32bit words 
rather than 3 bytes to describe a color value in a 24bit server). I
was rather shocked the first time I saw how large a PC-based X server
on a host with 24bit color could get. So if you're used to seeing
X running on Suns and HPs, it's quite a jump in size.


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Date: 22-Mar-00  Time: 20:04:14

Craig Orsinger                  (email: <orsingerc@epg-gw1.lewis.army.mil>)
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