I have also posted in the linux mint forums and IRC #KDE but do not get a response.

Linux Mint 17.2 KDE (also occurred in 17.1)
AMD Radeon HD 6970
8 GB RAM

using htop:

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/X :0 -audit 0 -auth /var/lib/mdm/:0.Xauth -nolisten tcp vt8

After booting, this processes' MEM% is low, around 3 to 4% but within a couple hours or so will balloon to around 65%+ on a system with 8 GB of RAM. Is there any legitimate reason X needs over 4 GB of RAM? At most, I have firefox (maybe 25 tabs), konsole, clementime, kate and synergy running most of the time. The slowdown when it comes to opening/moving to new browser tabs, minimizing windows, etc becomes painfully slow. Any suggestions to resolve what might be causing this behaviour?

Logging out and back in now appears to resolve the issue (in Linux Mint 17.1 this was not the case, a reboot was needed) although it's annoying.

Thanks!

Smells like a texture/drawable leak.
Please use "xrestop" to check *what* has allocated that much memory and post (in code tags, please) /var/log/Xorg.0.log for inspection of driver/settings.

Current htop

MEM% 37.9

From xrestop, the largest offender (not much):

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O1a00000    45    1    0  240  470    66115K     12K  66127K 24535 kwin

/var/log/Xorg.0.log is here:

http://pastebin.com/Hn11i3LS

Thanks

KWin load is from compositing redirection (press Shift+Alt+F12 and see that number vanish

There're plenty reports about fglrx leaking memory, though:
https://www.google.de/search?q=fglrx+memory+leak resp.
http://ati.cchtml.com/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=leak

This bug http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1178 sounds as if the leaks occur everytime a gl context is closed, what happens *really* often in QML driven KDE 5 or tabbing in OpenGL accelerated browsers

You may check the radeon driver and see whether those leaks occur as well.
If not, it's most likely fglrx (and the only two options you have is to either not use fglrx or restart X11, since the leak is in the driver)

Thanks luebking. It looks as though CVS in another thread is convinced it comes down the kernel. I'm not sure how to troubleshoot directly if fglrx ("radeon driver") is really the culprit unless you have ideas. For now, I'm willing to logout/login.

There's a "radeon" driver from MESA - that's not fglrx ("catalyst")

Try installing "xserver-xorg-video-radeon" (which should collide with fglrx - if not, rather uninstall the latter explicitly)