Digikam bug #243692 "Digikam uses all memory with thumbnails"

[Vlado Plaga]

Binary package hint: digikam

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243692

This bug in digiKam 1.3.0 renders the program almost useless for me: I like flipping through pages with many thumbnails, but I can't allow DigiKam to use all of my RAM. I repeatedly had to kill the program when it had already consumed more than 1500 MBytes.

The bug is allegedly fixed in digiKam 1.4.0.

I'll ask on the digikam developers list if someone can produce an isolated patch for digiKam 1.3.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: digikam 2:1.3.0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-19.26-generic 2.6.35.3
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-19-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Aug 27 19:18:20 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Alpha amd64 (20100826)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=de_DE.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: digikam

[Vlado Plaga (vlado-gmx)]

Gilles Gauliers, the digiKam lead developer, recommends updating to 1.4.0, which according to him is just a bugfix release:

http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-devel/2010-August/045281.html

[JC Hulce (soaringsky)]

This bug has been marked as Fix Committed for over a year. If the fix has made it into Ubuntu, please mark this bug as Fix Released. If the fix has been released upstream, but not Ubuntu, create a new bug asking for the new version and tag it with upgrade-software-version. If this bug has not been fixed anywhere, change the status back to Confirmed.

[Vlado Plaga (vlado-gmx)]

I'm not using Ubuntu 10.10 anymore (and support for that release ends next month anyway), but according to http://packages.ubuntu.com/ it now includes digiKam 1.4, where this bug should be fixed.

[Bee Catt (ubuntu-ag)]

I have digikam version 4.2.5.0-1ubuntu2 on ubuntu 12.04 and I still have a severe memory leak. I have 1.4 GB + 4.7 GB swap, swappiness set to 90 (90% of load will go to physical RAM, 10% to swap).

When this issue first presented, Digikam was hogging memory right from startup if I had any albums added with more than a couple hundred photos. Turning off all exporter kipi plugins seems to have made startup and scanning album collections a bit faster, but trying to actually USE digikam to DO anything with my photos quickly begins to be a problem... even just loading an album or scrolling through the photos is excrutiatingly slow...trying to move or delete anything makes my entire computer unuseable for up to half an hour or sometimes longer unless I get frustrated and do a hard shutdown of my computer.

In system moniter, digikam shows as using less than 10% CPU even when my computer is so unuseable that just starting system monitor to check that takes 10 minutes. Digikam consistently shows as using about 850 MB RAM, and the remaining processes on my system use less than 1GB, even when I am using several other programs. Yet, when I switch to the resources tab in system monitor, it shows that "something" is using a total of 3.5-4 GB RAM.

Closing Digikam normally hides the window and makes the program appear closed, however checking system monitor shows no change in system memory usage and digikam still shows in the process list as using around 850 MB RAM and 0 CPU. System still practically unuseable. Killing Digikam process in system monitor immediatly returns system to normal.

Ran valgrind according to instructions on digikam site with the following summary:

==20392== LEAK SUMMARY:
==20392== definitely lost: 60,499 bytes in 370 blocks
==20392== indirectly lost: 233,431 bytes in 3,082 blocks
==20392== possibly lost: 7,761,872 bytes in 19,168 blocks
==20392== still reachable: 4,566,287 bytes in 19,114 blocks
==20392== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==20392== Reachable blocks (those to which a pointer was found) are not shown.
==20392== To see them, rerun with: --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes
==20392==
==20392== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==20392== Use --track-origins=yes to see where uninitialised values come from
==20392== ERROR SUMMARY: 5113780 errors from 2426 contexts (suppressed: 1 from 1)