xorg: Maximum number of clients reached

[Michael Butash]

Some follow up on this - Chromium was definitely a problem.  I stopped 
using it for the past week, all my odd issues went away, and my desktop 
has been perfectly stable since.

Even disabling all plugins, all hardware interaction, it would still 
start causing my x client counts to blow out, my screen locker would 
freak out, and randomly apps wouldn't work or spawn new.  I migrated 
back to firefox, and it's been quite back to its old reliable self.  I 
also don't catch it chewing up 25gb of memory too which is nice.

I even filed a bug with the chromium people.  Crap part is once it 
freaks out the counts, I can't find a way to see what is using them, as 
itself tries to spawn a client session and cannot.  Since I know it's 
chromium, I suppose I'll just have to enable everything and pull a gdb 
trace with it, hoping some dev wants to help troubleshoot it.

I always feel cursed with these things, but no one else sees the same in 
their chromiums on linux?  I'd be interested to see the results from 
others.  I made a little one-liner script I can call to monitor with 
watch in a small cli window in the corner.

echo "/usr/bin/xlsclients | wc -l" > ~/bin/xclients
chmod +x ~/bin/xclients
watch ~/bin/xclients

One odd fact I've found out of this, Canonical leaves their x client 
counts hardcoded to 256, whereas redhat and cent upped this some time 
ago to 512 in their compiled xorg servers.  If google and various window 
managers are going to drive those usages, seems xorg needs to fix this 
or at least up the count and make uniform among the vendors.

-mb


On 06/20/2015 09:32 AM, Michael Butash wrote:
> So Chromium is definitely causing the x client limit to be hit, but 
> "not always"...  It's really odd, and I can't explain it.