gnash-gtk Consumes Memory until Kernel OOM Killer Steps In

[Ralph Corderoy]

Binary package hint: gnash

Ubuntu 7.10. gnash 0.8.1-0ubuntu3. firefox 1nobinonly-0ubuntu0.7.10.

Visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/europe/7335351.stm in firefox. Page displays fine. Edit URL, replacing "/low/" with "/hi/". New page starts to load. The flash movie at the top of it starts to have gnash display its circle of "busy" dots. Machine then slows. Furious disc activity follows. Then firefox (and gnash) die.

Switching to a text console running free(1) in a loop before the URL is loaded shows the Mem/free figure shrink to 7200 at which point console messages from the kernel OOM killer appear and it decides to kill off firefox and gnash. That restores the machine.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 or 9.04?

[Ralph Corderoy (ralph-inputplus)]

No idea. But it works fine in 8.04.

[der_vegi (m-may)]

I see this problem with gnash 0.8.6-0ubuntu1 on Karmic amd64 with all updates applied until today: Sometimes the process gnash-gtk consumes so much memory, that my computer almost freezes (login on tty takes around 1 min) until it is stopped.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnash (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]