Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 73860
Python voraciously eating memory
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:46:36 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.18-3 i686) Description of problem: Python seems to be eating up a great deal of memory. At times up to 1.5 GB+ RAM and swap. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Start a new session 2.python process started automatically by system 3.python continues to run and eat up memory Actual Results: Python will eat up memory until there is none left (just a guess since I have 3 GB RAM plus swap and the slow down is noticeable once the swap starts to be consumed) or until the process is killed. Expected Results: Python would use up a reasonable amount of memory. Additional info: There does not seem to be any output of the problem (i.e. no oops or warnings). The system just seems to get sluggish after ~30-40 min. I then check the process monitor and python is continually using an obscene amount of memory (at least 2-3x more than any other proces save for X). I am using python-2.2.1-17 on an athlon XP2100+ with 1 GB PC2700 DDR SDRAM with 2GB swap space.
What program is running? Python is just an interpreter...
I think that python is running rhn-applet-gui. I went into the process monitor and turned on the argument option and got the following for python: "/usr/bin/python /usr/bin/rhn-applet-gui --sm-client-id default5". I no longer run the rhn daemon and I took rhn applet off of my panel (there is not much need for RHN with Rawhide), so I do not know why this component is still running. Could the memory problem be due to the absense of the two other programs?
what version of the applet are you running? (rpm -q rhn-applet) also what version of gnome-python2 and pygtk2? there were leaks in earlier versions, but they should all be fixed with the latest in rawhide
rhn-applet-2.0.0-14 gnome-python2-1.99.11-7 pygtk2-1.99.12-4 All packages appear to be the most recent versions. There may be more recent versions available, but the ftp site and mirrors have not change since August 30. I assume that there is some major security flaw that needs to be fixed and every dependency recompiled and repackaged. So if this is true perhaps the problem has been fixed, if not then the problem has not been fixed.
We identified 2 memory leaks due to the python bindings in some release of gtk+ and the RPM libraries. The first one is fixed in the current release Red Hat 9 (was also fixed in Red Hat 8) and the second one, harder to trigger is being fixed as an errata, and available in rawhide. That should close this problem, thanks, Daniel