Shotwell 0.12.3 consumes massive amount of RAM if auto-import is on and you have a large photo library

[PrivateUser132781]

When initially trying to import all of my photos (about 27 000, man RAWs), Shotwell kept crashing. I discovered it ran out of memory during the operation. I finally managed to get it to finish by increasing my swap space to 32GB.

However, everytime I launch the application while the "watch library directory for new files" option is switched on, it starts an auto-import process (even if there are no new files) and the application ends up consuming a huge amount of RAM that it never releases. As you can see in the attached screenshot, the application -- which had been running for some time, no new photos to import -- is using more than 15GB of memory.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: shotwell 0.12.3-0ubuntu0.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-27.43-generic 3.2.21
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-27-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu11
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Aug 6 18:37:14 2012
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_ZA:en
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_ZA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: shotwell
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[PrivateUser132781 (privateuser132781-deactivatedaccount)]

Launchpad won't let me link the upstream bug report.

First, it says that Shotwell bugs are tracked at http://trac.yorba.org , while it is in fact redmine.yorba.org.

Second, it claims not to recoginise this bug tracker URL:

http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/5622

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

Right. We used to use Trac to track bugs at Yorba, but we switched to Redmine about a year ago. Launchpad can't (yet) link to Redmine bugs, so for now we just add a comment like this:

This has also been reported upstream at http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/5622 .

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.