policykitd leaks memory

[Dražen Kačar]

Binary package hint: policykit

Package: policykit
Version: 0.9-4ubuntu2
Ubuntu release: 10.04

I upgraded yesterday to Ubuntu 10.04 and found out that policykitd leaks memory big time. It grows by about 1 MB per 5 seconds or so. When it takes too much, the machine starts swapping and becomes unusable. I never let it grow above 1.5 GB (the machine has 2 GB and at that point I can no longer work), but I suppose it wouldn't stop growing.

I've tried restarting it, but that didn't help. BTW, /etc/init.d/policykitd script doesn't do anything for stop and restart commands, which is a bug in itself. I happen to need restart badly right now. :-)

Lsof doesn't show unusual open files. Strace output is attached, so I'm not going to describe it here. I didn't change any of its configuration files. Or any other configuration files, since the upgrade to 10.04.

Untill this issue gets fixed, can you tell me what are the consequences of disabling policykitd? The man page lacks that information.

[Dražen Kačar (dave-fly)]

Sorry, the program name is polkitd, not policykitd.