gam_server eats all the RAM slowly
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
gamin (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
Medium
|
Sebastien Bacher |
Bug Description
Today I've noticed that my laptop was acting sluggish, and half of the swap
space was eaten. I discovered that gam_server took over 400 megs of virtual
memory, killed it, and went back to work. A few hours later I noticed the same
thing (gam_server eating 500 megs this time), and killed it again. gam_server
started growing again.
To summarize: whenever I kill gam_server, it respawns and starts allocating
memory at the rate of about 0.1 meg per 3 seconds (according to
gnome-system-
gdb doesn't help mutch (I get a lot of question marks). ltrace/strace show a
lot of activity -- stating a bunch of files, watching /etc/mtab, writing to
pipes, calling strange numbered syscalls 292 and 293 (I guess strace/ltrace
doesn't recognize inotify?).
ltrace -c -S -p `pidof gam_server` for a 10-second period shows
20116 calls to g_free
16457 calls to g_strdup_printf
3324 calls to g_strdup
3187 calls to g_malloc0
90 calls to g_malloc
and a bunch of other calls that don't seem to be related to memory management at
first glance.
Logging out and back in fixed the problem. gam_server now just sits there at
2.6 megs and does not grow.