GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 649477
Slow leak in Shell in current Fedora 15
Last modified: 2013-06-14 16:17:31 UTC
Running current Fedora 15, I've noticed for the last few weeks that Shell leaks memory slowly. It may have been going on longer and I just never noticed because it never stayed up long enough before. :) With a system uptime of nearly 3 days (some of which which will have been spent in suspend), Shell is using 646.5MB of RAM, per gnome-system-monitor. If I kill it, forcing it to restart, it goes down to 30.2MB. Obviously more data is needed here, but I don't know the best way to provide it; please advise me. Thanks. gnome-shell-3.0.1-2.fc15.x86_64
CCing Colin as I saw him active on some other mem leak bugs.
See bug 642652 for a major leak
is there a quick way to tell if that's what I'm hitting?
(In reply to comment #3) > is there a quick way to tell if that's what I'm hitting? No quick way; valgrind is probably your best bet. Be patient =)
gneesh, valgrind. I think I'll go with the 'apply patch, rebuild gnome-shell, then see if it's still leaking' approach. =)
I applied the patch from 642652, rebuilt Shell, rebooted, and on day #2 it's up to over 200MB of memory, so that ain't the one I'm hitting :/
I see similar behavior on Gentoo x64, with latest available packages from gnome overlay (gnome-base/gnome-shell-3.0.2, gcc 4.6). If you would want more system/compile info from me I will be happy to provide. For me gnome-shell starts from 30M or so and within several days go to 300M
So one issue I see is simply that we aren't garbage collecting enough. See e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664613
(In reply to comment #8) > So one issue I see is simply that we aren't garbage collecting enough. See > e.g. > > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664613 I am not sure it is related to GC of other memory intensive apps. Just for checking it, I have rebooted, login into gnome and left it run without any additional apps. In this test my initial memory usage right after reboot was 59.6M. Over next 13 hours it monotonically grew to 128M... That gives about 5MB/hour memory leak in pretty much gnome alone.
A valgrind log would be extremely helpful. There's not much we can do other than being psychic.
(In reply to comment #10) > A valgrind log would be extremely helpful. There's not much we can do other > than being psychic. Will be happy to provide. What is a proper way to run valgrind for debugging gnome-shell? Do I need to recompile gnome shell with debugging enabled? I did a quick search but could not find appropriate instruction set.
There is a way to see quickly the memory leak : click many times on an element of the top bar (like calendar or the username menu) and see the memory consumption of the gnome-shell process increases. It's working for the activites menu too.
Anthony, in 3.4 I have so far been unable to trigger a visible memory increase by repeatedly opening/closing the calendar menu, the user menu, the app menu or the Activities overlay mode.
I have forgotten to say that I am running on gnome 3.6.1, I had not seen this bug on gnome 3.4 ;)
There's no valgrind log that would indicate what is/was the problem and we've fixed a lot of leaks since the bug was filed => closing.