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

Gordon Messmer yinyang at eburg.com
Sun Jan 13 00:32:02 UTC 2013


On 01/08/2013 05:25 AM, Paul Bijnens wrote:
> 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.

It doesn't imply that at all.  Shared memory use is reported as RES for 
all of the applications that load the shared libraries.  It's not just 
for one of them.

Since shared libraries are also loaded when the application starts, RES 
will normally start out large for applications so affected.  When RES 
grows over time, without bound, it's probably an actual memory leak.

To debug the clock applet, first you'd have to kill it, and then start 
it under valgrind:
   valgrind -v --log-file=/var/tmp/clock-applet.log clock-applet

Let it run until you believe it has leaked memory, then kill it again. 
The log file should have details about any detected memory leaks.



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