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

[Paul Bijnens]

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 Bijnens
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