Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 481800
pidgin gtk-spell excessive memory use
Last modified: 2010-06-28 07:09:17 EDT
Description of problem: When running pidgin with like 20 tabs and 50+ (mostly offline) contacts in couple of XMPP accounts, pidgin runs in whole day session way above 1.5GB VIRT RAM in a day and computer is almost unusable. After lengthy discussion on #performance channel of irc.gnome.org I run valgrind with the suggested paramters G_SLICE=always-malloc G_DEBUG=gc-friendly valgrind --leak-check=full \ --show-reachable=yes --leak-resolution=high pidgin over night. Unfortunately on computer with 1GB hardware RAM, I hit OOM killer, but results seems to be interesting anyway. What's the deal with pidgin_setup_gtkspell() being called a zillion times? Attached all results of my analysis. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): pidgin-2.5.4-1.fc11.x86_64 How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1.run pidgin whole day 2. 3. Actual results: top shows over 1.5 GB VIRT RAM in top and computer crawls for its life Expected results: memory consumption of memory shouldn't go over couple of hundred megs.
Created attachment 330119 [details] dmesg from the analysis
Created attachment 330120 [details] dmesg.out from the analysis
Created attachment 330121 [details] messages from the analysis
Created attachment 330122 [details] messages-20090127 from the analysis
Created attachment 330123 [details] performance-irc-gnome-org-log.txt from the analysis
Created attachment 330125 [details] pidgin-valgrind-03.txt.bz2 from the analysis
Created attachment 330305 [details] first log with the idea to switch off spellchecker After more discussions on #pidgin I tried to switch off spellchecker-as-you-go in pidgin and the memory consumption went drastically down to the level that pidgin is useful to me again. attaching relevant logs of #pidgin on this.
Created attachment 330306 [details] second log confirming that switching off spellchecker helped
It turns out that GtkSpell isn't using enchant in such a way that allows it to reuse dictionaries between multiple instances: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2642198&group_id=7896&atid=107896
Maybe it could be useful to copy here verbatim the IRC conversation from the Sourceforge ticket: Here is an IRC conversation with the enchant maintainer about the subject: 09:08 < datallah> dom: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=481800 that is the bug report relating to the enchant memory usage issues a few days ago. 09:09 < datallah> There is a lot of irrelevant information there, but the problem as far as I can see is that the dictionary isn't shared between multiple gtkspell instances (which is perhaps a gtkspell problem, but I thought that the caching would occur at the enchant layer). 09:10 < dom> some significant caching does happen at the enchant layer 09:10 < dom> all dictionaries are cached at the "broker" level 09:10 < dom> if pidgin or gtkspell is creating lots of brokers, it's going to load lots of dictionaries 09:11 < dom> the broker was meant to be a singleton, and is documented as such 09:11 < dom> but there's nothing enforcing you to use it as such 09:11 < datallah> ok, i'll check how gtkspell does it. 09:31 < datallah> gtkspell uses a broker per instance 09:33 < dom> that would explain it
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 11 development cycle. Changing version to '11'. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
GtkSpell 2.0.16 has been released with a fix for this issue: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=da6ae2570910222025t7ba7d717ge254e9fe00d684c8%40mail.gmail.com
This message is a reminder that Fedora 11 is nearing its end of life. Approximately 30 (thirty) days from now Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 11. It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '11'. Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' to a later Fedora version prior to Fedora 11's end of life. Bug Reporter: Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we may not be able to fix it before Fedora 11 is end of life. If you would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version of Fedora please change the 'version' of this bug to the applicable version. If you are unable to change the version, please add a comment here and someone will do it for you. Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes bugs or makes them obsolete. The process we are following is described here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
Fedora 11 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2010-06-25. Fedora 11 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.