Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 100793
Excessive memory usage with default tcltk packages
Last modified: 2005-10-31 17:00:50 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030314 Description of problem: Excessive memory usage can occur when running a tcltk app with the version of tcltk installed by default on Redhat 9. We've seen increases in memory usage for some of our tcltk apps of two orders of magnitude (8MB to 800MB). In some cases the excessive use of swap space makes the machine essentially unresponsive. If we uninstall the default tcltk packages (rpm --erase) and reinstall the same version of tcltk from tarballs, the memory usage returns to normal. This website has a possible explanation of the problem (http://www.interlink.com.au/anthony/tech/rh9-tcltk/). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): tcltk-8.3.5-88 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run a medium size tcltk app with the default tcltk rpms 2. Now remove the default rpms and run the app with tcltk installed from tarballs 3. Memory usage can differ by as much as two orders of magnitude. Actual Results: Memory usage increases by up to two orders of magnitude with default tcltk rpms. Expected Results: Only a small change in memory usage. Additional info:
Thanks for the report. Yes, I think this is currently "fixed" in rawhide since I reverted the change to ucs4 there for the time being. [This change was made rather late in the RHL9 development cycle for compatibility with python through tkinter. However it seems to have done more damage than good. :-( It seems we were mistaken in thinking Tcl/Tk could be configured easily for ucs4...]
*** Bug 128746 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***