Xclock grows and grows (Was Re: How can I check for swap space?)

[John Mills]

Ian -

Thanks for the suggestions. They have given me more symptoms.

On Sat, 9 Aug 2003, Ian Dowse wrote:

> In message
> <Pine.LNX.4.44.0308080945100.4077-100000 at localhost.localdomain>, Joh n
> Mills writes:

 [Concerning problems with a newly-installed 4.8-Release from the CD set.

> >'startx' still proceeds until it fills all available memory. In 
> >particular, 'top' shows the size of 'xclock' growing while other processes 
> >seem OK.
> ...
> >2) Does this [mis]behavior sound familiar to anyone?
 
> I've seen this before when the "fontconfig" system got confused. Try
> running
 
>   fc-cache -fv
> as root. If that doesn't fix it, try:

That also dumped on ever-growing swap after first creating cache for the 
100DPI fonts and while working on the 75DPI

>   echo "*clock.render: false" >> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XClock

This did allow 'startx' to get past starting 'xclock', but the next thing 
I tried, 'xterm', then repeated the fill-swap-and-dump scenario.

I guess I don't know if the problem is related to X11, bad usage of swap
space, or some other memory issue. I should try some non-X11 activity 
(other than the underlying OS activity) and see what happens.

I noticed on installation that many packages related to Gnome hadn't been 
read successfully from the CD. Perhaps I have a defectively written CD 
behind all this.

 John Mills
 john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu