memory leak in evince: using gigabytes of ram when selecting text

[sachit]

When I select text in a certain pdf, evince consumes hundreds of MBs to a few GBs of RAM. This ram is not freed on deselection. High CPU usage accompanies the RAM allocation.

version: evince 3.4.0
OS: ubuntu 12.04 fully updated.

Steps to reproduce: Open the pdf I have attached and attempt to select around a page of text. Keep a system monitor or a terminal open so you can kill it easily if your system freezes for lack of RAM.

[Quinn Balazs (qbalazs)]

Please collect and attach Valgrind forensics using the method detailed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind. These will allow us to see specifically what the issue is. Before being able to collect Valgrind forensics you will need to install the debug symbols for evince if you don't currently have those installed (sudo apt-get install evince-dbg).

Once you've done that, set the status here back to new, and we'll take a look at the logs.

Thanks.

[sachit (staticd-growthecommons)]

The valgrind log of he operation after normal termination.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Glenn Horton-Smith (glenn-hortonsmith)]

I can confirm I see the same behavior with the pdf file provided by the original reporter.

The valgrind output may be difficult to interpret. I see many of the same errors in valgrind of evince processing pdf files that don't provoke this behavior. I found it hard to find any error that wasn't present in both cases.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

sachit, thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, I am closing it because the bug has been fixed in the latest development version of Ubuntu - Vivid Vervet.

This is a significant bug in Ubuntu. If you need a fix for the bug in previous versions of Ubuntu, please perform as much as possible of the SRU Procedure [1] to bring the need to a developer's attention.

[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Procedure