X memory leak with KDE 4.7

[benthepoet]

Currently running KDE 4.7 with Kernel 3.0 and ATI fglrx drivers. Noticed after about an hour-and-a-half of uptime, X memory usage was at 2 gigs and slowly climbing. I was running Chromium, Firefox, and NetBeans at the time. Even after closing all applications X didn't release any memory. For the time being I've jumped back to Kernel 2.6.39 to see if the issue is still present. Desktop effects are set to XRender and animations are turned off. Just wondered if anyone else has noticed this issue.

[benthepoet]

The problem appears to be with XRender as the compositing type under Desktop Effects. Memory leak persisted on both kernel 3.0 and 2.6.39 as well as both ATI and Nvidia proprietary drivers. Notably every time you trigger the Present Windows effect, X's memory usage will increase quite a bit. When I opened up xrestop, KWin appeared to be the one hogging all the memory.

What I ended up doing was setting the compositing type to OpenGL and setting the QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM variable to 'raster'. With these settings it doesn't seem like the leak is present, X's memory usage is now consistently around 30MB.