Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 163948
gnome-panel vm usage increases constantly, possible leak
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:10 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050720 Fedora/1.1-0.2.3.deerpark.alpha2 Firefox/1.0+ Description of problem: I'm seeing huge vm usage for gnome-panel (and e.g. wnck-applet too) over time, and it grows steadily, although luckily the RSS has stabilised at around 18m, output from top shows: 16581 bill 16 0 187m 18m 12m S 0.0 3.7 0:09.21 gnome-panel 16589 bill 16 0 107m 15m 8620 S 0.0 3.0 0:35.76 wnck-applet Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.11.4-2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run GNOME for a while 2. Look at output of top ... sorting my memory usage helps :) 3. There is no step 3. Actual Results: Memory usage growing, apparently unbounded. Expected Results: Memory usage should be fairly static .. gnome-panel just sits there and has buttons to push that launch other programs, it shouldn't need this much VM for that. Additional info: I've noticed high memory usage for gnome-panel and wnck-applet before, but it's got no better, and has persisted right through FC3 and FC4 into current development.
btw I have seen the other "memory leak in gnome panel" bug but that appears to be related to recent-files and/or opening things in nautilus, and I don't have any nautilus windows open at all ...
This doesn't look like a memory leak - if it was a memory leak the growth in RSS wouldn't stop. You shouldn't pay any attention to the VSS, figure, basically. If you look at the pmap output for the panel you'll see that most of that is taken up by the icon theme cache mapped into memory. This is read-only, and thus shared.
Erm ... OK (sorry). Just one question (for my info, not a whinge) - do you know why the "SHR" column of ps isn't reflecting the sharing of those mappings (the caches)? I can see the mappings, you were quite right, just not sure why they're not "looking" like they're shared, apart from the read-only marking.