[Dri-devel] Exceedingly large memory usage in XFree CVS, as of 20030213

[Pawel S. <pa...@th...>]

Hi,

I reported some time ago (Sat, 1 Feb 2003 22:38:44 +0100, message-id: 
<20030201213844.GS19531@nora>) that return to Castle Wolfenstein 
stutters with radeon 8500. The problem was traced to large memory usage 
by the game. Back then, I did not know whether it was a problem with 
the game or with XFree.

Today, I have run a molecular visualisation program on a RNA strand (I 
usually deal with slightly smaller molecules) and I was surprised when 
I noticed that the process occupied more than 200MB of memory. 
Disabling the visualisation mode reduced the memory usage to mere 8MB. 
So, the 200MB memory is basically used by a very simple display list 
generation that for the molecule in question creates a 1336 
GL_QUAD_STRIP's with total 34736 glVertex3f vertexes (26 vertexes per 
strip) and 1212 GL_TRIANGLES with 465408 total glVertex3fv vertexes 
(384 per glBegin/glEnd group) - which seem like reasonable values.

My primary suspect is then XFree86, or exactly GL library. I thought I 
would start reporting the problem here first, particulary because I get 
following message in dmesg:
[drm:radeon_lock_take] *ERROR* 4 holds heavyweight lock

I will appreciate any redirection to more appriopriate lists, if needed.

Pawel
-- 
Pawel Salek
http://www.theochem.kth.se/~pawsa/
Theoretical Chemistry Division, KTH