gvfsd leaks memory whenever there is a CD is the cd drive

[Matt Pharoah]

Binary package hint: gvfs

Whenever a CD is placed in the CD tray, gvfsd leaks memory (and if left for long enough would eventually use up all the system's memory) and causes dbus-daemon to use 100% CPU until the CD is removed. When the CD is removed, it stops leaking memory, but does not free any memory that was used.

I first noticed this when I tried to see if Age of Empires 2 would run in WINE, and I noticed that gvfsd was leaking memory and dbus-daemon was using 100% CPU. I found that when I removed the CD, the memory stopped going up and gvfsd was no longer messing with dbus anymore.

I tried this again later with a CD that contained only a single wave file (to make sure that the previous CD didn't do something stupid like have a hard link to a parent directory somehow), but the same thing happened: gvfsd leaked memory so long as the CD was in, and it made dbus-daemon use 100% CPU.

I haven't yet tested to see if this happens with a blank CD, but it seems to happen for everything else. I'm running Karmic on an HP Pavillion dv7. I have no such problem on Windows, so it can't be purely a hardware problem.

It also doesn't matter if the CD is in the computer on startup or if you insert a CD after logging in. Either way, it leaks memory like crazy. You don't need to be viewing files or reading or writing for this memory leak. All you need is to have a CD in the CD drive.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a valgrind log following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind and attach the file to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[Matt Pharoah (mpharoah)]

Unfortunately I had to send the laptop this bug occurs on to be fixed (for an unrelated problem), but it gave me a chance to see if this happens on a desktop computer, and it does not, so it seems to be specific to certain types of cd drives. I'm not the only person to have this problem, however, so faulty hardware seems very unlikely. I will attach a valgrind log as soon as I get the computer back.

Also, how can I run valgrind on a critical process?

[Matt Pharoah (mpharoah)]

I have my computer back now and just checked to to make this is still a bug, but it seems to be working perfectly fine now. An update must have fixed the problem. Sweet.