GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 568803
Leaky at-spi-registryd
Last modified: 2010-01-06 20:47:38 UTC
Please describe the problem: at-spi-registryd slowly consumes more and more memory on my system. It starts at under 1% and remains there for a while. I run pidgin, evolution, gnome-terminal and firefox 3.0/3.1. This is a fairly standard application load for me. My system is a bit aged with 512 MB of RAM and 1G of swap, but this load doesn't seem particularly excessive. I've seen at-spi-registryd using as much as 27% of my memory according to ps. By way of comparison, a firefox 3.0 process running for the same amount of time during that run only used 13%. Steps to reproduce: Typically happens after several hours of use. I think it may be tied to firefox, as I typically notice a spike after either a log or an intense website loads. Actual results: "ps auxw |grep at-spi-registryd" eventually shows the process has broken past 1% and is slowly getting bigger. It seems to grow in waves, cresting then dropping to a lower value, but never back to below 1%. It might, for instance, spike to 5% then drop back down to 3. Then it goes to 10, drops to 8, goes to 14... These spikes don't correspond with any new, more excessive uses of resources. The first spike happened when I pulled up a JS-intensive website, but the second spike happened when I loaded bugs.gnome.org to file this report. While this would seem to indicate that the issue is in FF, the reality is that the at-spi-registryd process that eventually consumes hundreds of megs of memory is what ultimately causes me to reboot every few hours, even if I kill and restart FF. Expected results: I'd expect to be able to use my system for more than a few hours at a time. :) Does this happen every time? It's happening daily. I honestly can't remember if this has always happened or if it's only recent and I've finally gotten frustrated with it enough to start debugging it. Other information: Please let me know how I can help debug this further. If there's another app/AT toolkit leaking objects into the at-spi-registryd or something similar, I'll gladly file a bug report with them, I just don't know how to figure that out. I just point the finger at registryd because it's what I can see hogging all the resources here. :)
Has anyone taken a look at this? It still exists, it still has me rebooting my Linux box more frequently than XP, and I'm still not sure how to help you help me more. I've run at-spi-registryd under valgrind. I think it shows that the registryd process itself isn't leaking, but perhaps the underlying orbit is? I'm not terribly experienced at reading valgrind logs, but maybe some of you are. One thing's for sure, though. This log shows at-spi-registryd using 300 megs at exit, unless I read it wrong. Let me know what additional information to provide. Perhaps this is an orbit bug, but this is the process ps and now valgrind shows as the huge memory hog.
Created attachment 128557 [details] Valgrind log
I don't find any leak on my machine. I don't shutdown or reboot my machine frequently. Did you build some libraries by yourself and cause the leak?
(In reply to comment #3) > I don't find any leak on my machine. ~~~~ serious leak, actually :)
I haven't seen this in a while. At this point, I'm suspecting that something on my Ubuntu systems was leaking, perhaps a shared library, and the way it manifested that I could see was in a leaky at-spi. Hasn't happened in quite some time, though, so I suspect that a dist-upgrade fixed the issue. I'm closing this. Let me know if I closed it incorrectly for the type of solution that ultimately worked. Maybe it's supposed to be invalid?