What's eating my X server ?

[Jeremy Cook]

I have a problem with running X on my system. After 2-3 days the Xserver
process is sooo big that I have to kill my session and start again. Here's
the scenario:

I have a 16MB Sun SparcStation 1 with GX colour accelerator and local SCSI
disk.  I have added an extra swap file on the /home partition

I am running:

	MIT X server (patched all the way to fix 18 and compiled with C1.0 from sun)
          (started with -bs and -su)
	mwm (Motif 1.1)
	several xterms (3-4 on average)
	xclock
	xrn (6.9)
	cm, mailtool, filemgr (OpenWindows 2.0)
	contool 3c (Chuck Musciano)
	tmpfs

To begin with when I fire up X it has a size of 692k, which is just great.
But, after about 3 days it grows to some enormous size - today it was
30Meg - and begins to swap so much that I can't move the mouse for 5-10
minutes. THIS IS **VERY** ANNOYING!  Adding -bs and -su seemed to help
some, but really only delayed the problem a little.

I need to be able to find out which application is causing the Xserver to
grow so much. Is there an easy way to do this, apart from the obvious one
of doing without some applications for a few days to see if it helps?
Alternatively has anyone else had similar problems and solved them ?

 Jeremy Cook,  email : jeremy at eik.ii.uib.no | phone : +47 5 54 41 74 (direct)
 Parallel Processing Laboratory, University of Bergen, 
 High Technology Centre, N-5020 Bergen,Norway