GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 464577
nautilus memory footprint grows with each new background
Last modified: 2009-02-22 21:37:42 UTC
Please describe the problem: I have use several methods to periodically change the desktop background/wallpaper, including my own script, wp_tray, and wallpapoz. In each case, the memory footprint of nautilus (as reported by top) grows by approximately the size of the image bitmap for each new background image selected. As best I can tell this memory is never freed, and so after a day or two of new images each 5 minutes, nautilus can be taking up gigs of memory and slowing things to a crawl. Killing nautilus and allowing it to automatically restart is the only fix I've figured out. Although this may not technically be a memory leak (just an unbounded cache), it has the same effect. Going to the gnome desktop-background dialog and removing all the images does not seem to recover the memory. In the past I had used a common image filename and simply used gconftool-2 to unset and then reset the background after changing the image file, but more recently this stopped working as the updated image file was ignored in favor of the cached version. Steps to reproduce: 1. Startup gnome/nautilus 2. Change desktop background image a whole bunch of times 3. Watch nautilus size creep up Actual results: Nautilus eventually takes over all my system memory Expected results: I would expect that eventually old, unused image files are flushed from the cache. Does this happen every time? Yep. Other information: If someone can tell me how to manually flush the background image cache short of "killall nautilus", I'm all ears.
might be fixed http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2009/02/17/eternal-vigilance/ http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/nautilus?view=revision&revision=14963
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but the maintainers need more information to fix the bug. Could you please answer the questions in the other report in order to help the developers? *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 555876 ***
This seemed to be fixed for me a long time ago. I had actually forgot that I had filed a bug report.