upstart (session) consumes almost 3GB of memory after 24 hours of uptime

[Zygmunt Krynicki]

Running utopic with the ubuntu-desktop-next metapackage installed I see that media-hub-server is crashing many times per second (bug 1321203). Whatever is actually causing that the session upstart daemon now consumes about 3GB of memory after running like that for about one day.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.10
Package: upstart 1.12.1-0ubuntu7
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-24.47-generic 3.13.9
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-24-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.2-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Tue May 20 11:12:26 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-01-15 (124 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Alpha amd64 (20140115)
SourcePackage: upstart
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UpstartBugCategory: Session
UpstartRunningSessionCount: 1
UpstartRunningSessionVersion: init (upstart 1.12.1)
UpstartRunningSystemVersion: init (upstart 1.12.1)

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

Is your disk full? Does the memory drop down when you run 'start re-exec'?

[Zygmunt Krynicki (zyga)]

My disk isn't full:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc2 43G 25G 17G 60% /
none 4,0K 0 4,0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev 7,7G 4,0K 7,7G 1% /var/lib/schroot/mount/trusty-amd64-sbuild-431020d1-ac00-4431-9c95-4bdbaae91822/dev
tmpfs 1,6G 1,1M 1,6G 1% /run
none 5,0M 0 5,0M 0% /run/lock
none 7,7G 15M 7,7G 1% /run/shm
none 100M 76K 100M 1% /run/user
none 7,7G 0 7,7G 0% /ramdisk
/dev/sdb1 118G 90G 22G 81% /home
/dev/sdc1 487M 3,4M 483M 1% /boot/efi
/dev/sda1 459G 301G 136G 69% /srv

Yes, the memory usage has dropped down considerably:

 3102 zyga 20 0 47616 5628 1732 S 0.0 0.0 3h20:58 init --user --restart --state-fd 34

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

Since the re-exec makes the memory drop down, this sounds like an issue similar to bug 1235649 - a rogue client is connecting to upstart but without using a main loop, or not registering the required NIH main loop callbacks to allow libdbus linked into Upstart to flush the messages it is attempting to send to the client.

See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/1235649/comments/48

If so, fwics this is not a bug with Upstart, but a limitation of D-Bus not allowing the D-Bus server to determine if the client is "badly behaved" and just discard any D-Bus replies the server is expected to send to the client. The only correct behaviour for D-Bus if it cannot know if the client is badly behaved is to keep caching more and more reply messages until the client attempts to receive these reply messages.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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