Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 111518
gaim 0.74-5 has a memory leaking.
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:34 EST
Description of problem: After some hours of running gaim 0.74-5 (from the "test" updates) my system starts to lose free memory (both RAM and swap) until the kernel decides to start killing processes. If I close gaim, then I regain most of my (lost) memory. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gaim-0.74-5 How reproducible: Always (everyday since I installed it). Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install gaim-0.74-5 from fedora test packages. 2. Run gaim (I have currently 3 ICQ accounts, 4 MSN Messenger accounts, 3 Jabber accounts and 3 Yahoo Messenger accounts). 3. Wait some hours, and watch your precious memory start to decrease. Actual results: System runs off memory! Expected results: gaim shouldn't eat the memory of the system. Additional info: This didn't happen with previous versions of gaim, neither from Fedora Core or from freshrpms. Here is a little log of the "free" output when gaim is running: Mem: 255556k av, 248080k used, 7476k free, 0k shrd, 3032k buff 135364k active, 82732k inactive Swap: 783768k av, 781976k used, 1792k free 36156k cached (minutes later) Mem: 255556k av, 248360k used, 7196k free, 0k shrd, 3488k buff 157660k active, 60684k inactive Swap: 783768k av, 782828k used, 940k free 37860k cached (but if I close gaim) Mem: 255556k av, 147656k used, 107900k free, 0k shrd, 3600k buff 92096k active, 26540k inactive Swap: 783768k av, 137244k used, 646524k free 40056k cached I regain like 600 MB of free memory :O
I just found out that gaim developers are aware of this memory leaking. There is a small patch to solve it at: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~eblanton/gaim/gaim-0.75cvs-gaim_log_free.diff Hopefully, next version of gaim won't suffer from this leak. Do you think this patch can be applied to 0.74 or do you think we should wait until 0.75? (btw, I am concerned since 0.74 is no longer in "test" but in "updates" section).
Talking with gaim developers, they have informed me that this bug ONLY affects gaim if you use "by log" sorting method. You can either apply the above patch or use any other sorting method for your contact list. I'll change the contact list sort method and wait for the new version.
blizzard mentioned that he applied this to RH's internal CVS tree. We should probaly publish this as a FC1 update because it is quite severe...
Gaim also has a bunch of other bugs in this version, including: o loss of logging settings when upgrading o no 'system' log available at all I'd like to request that the 0.74 'update' package be pulled, and instead just use 0.71 (or a 0.72 update if those logging bugs are not present) if possible until a fixed version is released. 0.74 is going to cause lots of problems IMHO. Meanwhile I'm rolling back my package. :\
Those are not bugs per se. The gaim developers decided not to delay the release of gaim-0.74 before reimplementing those features because it would take far too long, and this gaim (except for the memory leak) works a lot better in a lot of other cases that caused crashes or broken ness.
There's a newer version in the testing tree that should fix this.