A new nvidia box was driving me crazy. Over time compiz was accumulating ram to the point of taking up 7 gigs on an 8 gig box. Apparently this only occurs with certain nvidia cards with less than 256 mb of memory.

Installing the Nvidia 173.08 beta driver made this box usable again!
Disclaimer: Its a beta so use at your own risk.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...in/+bug/151168
(Based on klerfayt's post in bug report.)



Nvidia drivers link
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

Select appropriate driver using pulldown menu and click on driver link and download the installer script.
As of 5-19 the driver was: Linux Display Driver Version 173.08 BETA.
In my case this was: NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.08-pkg2.run.

Download and make note of the location.


Open a terminal and issue the following commands:

Code:
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-glx-new nvidia-kernel-common
# if you have old driver then replace with nvidia-glx
# should remove restricted module ... if not remove manually

Code:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libc6-dev pkg-config xserver-xorg-dev
Enter a TTY terminal
Ctl Alt F1
This is necessary because we need to kill gnome.

Code:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
# for kubuntu: sudo /etc/init.d/kdm stop

Move to directory where driver is located and issue:

Code:
sudo sh [NVIDIAdriverfile]
In my case the command was:
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.08-pkg2.run

You will have to compile a kernel module.

I recommend that you allow nvidia to configure xorg.

Code:
sudo reboot