Major Memory leak in GTK Applications

0

I am running Linux Mint 17.1 (based on Ubuntu 14.04) MATE desktop. Recently, my system slowed down and opening up system monitor revealed that some applications were eating up a tremendous amount of RAM. The culprit applications were autokey-gtk and nm-applet. They were crunching RAM in GBs and still increasing.

I searched on the forums and found that there have been several bug reports filed for both of them. A few of those bug reports:

These bugs date back to 2011 and have not been resolved yet. But I guess, these bugs do not really belong to these applications. These applications are not culprit. Culprit must be some GTK function/library. Do you have any idea which GTK bug is causing this? Have any bug reports been filed for this? Is their any fix so far?

Moreover, this bug is not so easily reproducible. My computer had been working fine for months until I noticed this bug today. I'm still trying to find the trigger for this bug but I'm guessing it occurred when I was running VirtualBox. I'm not sure though. I will keep investigating and report the trigger for this bug.

shivams

Posted 2015-05-09T09:45:44.417

Reputation: 1 269

Answers

1

I very much doubt the gtk library is causing this (though not impossible).

Try running top in a terminal window, and check the memory usage of the applications you're running. Particularly check Firefox - the last version(s?) are very prone to get very very heavy. Last weeks, since I updated to version 37.0.1, i have had to restart Firefox several times daily.

Some other applications can be heavy users. Top will show you the memory and CPU usage. If you want more frequent updates, press s and then 1 (for each second).

Edit: Sorry, you did not say which tools you used. Also, you did not mentioned the values reported by top - do they approach 100% CPU or memory utilization? Increasing memory usage is not enough - they might increase and then 'clean up' or stabilize after a while.

The link to nm-applet indicates the problem has been solved in #26

I can't seem to find reliable references to autokey memory problems.

jcoppens

Posted 2015-05-09T09:45:44.417

Reputation: 629

As mentioned in my question, I investigated it using system monitor and atop and many other tools. The culprits were autokey-gtk and nm-applet. – shivams – 2015-05-14T13:37:40.223

1Sorry, you did not say which tools you used. I updated my reply. – jcoppens – 2015-05-14T15:13:40.123

Thanks. I'll try to apply that fix for nm-applet. – shivams – 2015-05-14T16:11:40.280

Asked: 2015-05-09T09:45:44.417

Viewed: 654 times

Active: 2015-05-14T15:13:11.947