Public bug reported: kwin on open source drivers on a 1GB Radeon HD6870 (BARTS core) starts off using a lot of memory, and uses more and more until it can't allocate textures and you get black rectangles instead of windows sometimes. kill/restart kwin_x11 gets back to the same state as on login.
This might be a mesa/drm bug. I think it's something specific to ati graphics cards, because switching from radeon to intel cleared up the problem completely. (I'm running on Intel right now. I thought it was prob. a kwin or general mesa bug until I found out that it wasn't happening on Intel. I switched because my ATI card idles at about 80W with open source drivers, maybe since dual monitor means no VBI to change clocks? IDK, anyway it's horrible in the summer.) On Kubuntu 15.04, running kwin with compositing enabled, memory usage on login was at least 3 or 4GB. (free -h, looking at used - buffers/cache). "used" memory would increase steadily, and so would swap. kwin_x11 never showed up as having a large RSS with top / ps. I forget what its VSZ was. I suspect texture memory leaks would explain the memory / swap consumption with resident-set growth. My alt-tab window switcher in kwin is the "grid" effect, that shows scaled-down copies of all your windows. I also use the effect that lowers alpha to 90% on windows without focus. On Intel drivers, total memory use was under 2GB used on login. (Now at 2.9G used, with firefox and some other stuff open). Intel SnB integrated graphics. My entire graphics stack is stock Kubuntu 15.04 libraries and kernel. This is on a fresh install of 15.04, where Catalyst has never been installed. In case it matters, the root filesystem is on XFS on a RAID10. ** Affects: xserver-xorg-video-ati (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1487884 Title: excessive memory usage (with kwin) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/1487884/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs