[CentOS] gigantic memory leak in Clock Applet...

Wed Jan 9 09:31:55 UTC 2013
ken <gebser at mousecar.com>

On 01/08/2013 08:25 AM Paul Bijnens wrote:
>
>
> On 2013-01-06 23:18, fred smith wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 06, 2013 at 02:43:09PM -0500, ken wrote:
>>> On 01/06/2013 09:55 AM fred smith wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Jan 06, 2013 at 06:33:07AM -0500, ken wrote:
>>>>> Fred,
>>>>>
>>>>> Also running an up-to-date 5.8 but with just 2G of RAM, clock-applet
>>>>> consumes the following:
>>>>>
>>>>> PID USER PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>>>>> 4133 me  15   0 29568 3748 2944 S  0.0  0.2 190:51.33 clock-applet
>>>>>
>>>>> My uptime at the moment is coming on 68 days.  Over time the %CPU field
>>>>> may flicker up to 0.3 or even 0.7, but the RES column and others are
>>>>> steady at the numbers you see.  I should add that all Preferences which
>>>>> we'd expect to consume more resources (e.g., display seconds, 12-hour
>>>>> time) are on.
> [...]
>>
>> here's what top reports today (clock-applet has not been restarted since
>> the event mentioned in my original posting):
>>
>>     PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>> 11159 fredex    16   0  263m 149m  10m S  0.3  3.8   1:36.87 clock-applet
>>
>> in which I note it is now up to "149m".
>
>
> I had that problem also a few years back (CentOS 5.1, 5.2 or so).
> When Googling for it, I had found several bug reports about it.
> While some of those bug reports had some fixes in a "future" version
> mentioned, other bugreports mentioned that the problem disappeared
> all by itself.
>
> And indeed, for me too, some upgrades later, the problem disappeared
> for me too.
>
> Then I fell over:
>
> https://blogs.oracle.com/bnitz/entry/thanks_for_the_memories
> https://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
>
> which seems to imply that the shared libraries of all stuff used by Gnome
> gets measured in one of the gnome programs, frequently the clock-applet
> apparently.
>
> That implies that this problem is a red herring. I just means that during
> the lifetime of Gnome, there were lots of shared libraries loaded, and that
> memory shows up for 1 applet only.
>
> And, yes indeed, looking carefully I notice that now the black sheep getting
> all the blame is the wnck-applet for me currently, instead of the clock-applet.
> It's using 342m memory now (68 days uptime, without logout of gnome).
>
> And yes, googling for "wnck-applet memory" instead of "clock-applet memory"
> brings up a very similar list of bug reports, also telling sometimes it the
> problem disappeared all by itself.
>
> To find out which libraries all get counted for the clock-applet,
> run "pmap -x PID-of-clock-applet" on regular times, and see where the
> increase in memory is coming from.

Paul,

Excellent!  Thanks for unraveling the mystery.