Elusive memleaks and slowdowns of places

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

With extensive exercising of the places you see occasional, but big memleaks. Also notable slowdowns - mainly because of too aggresive memory reallocations.

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

Fixed (or at the very least "addressed" :-)) in lp:unity revision 566:

------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 566 [merge]
fixes bug(s): https://launchpad.net/bugs/652864
committer: Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <email address hidden>
branch nick: MASTER
timestamp: Fri 2010-10-01 12:17:29 +0200
message:
  Merge Mikkel's branch lp:~unity-team/unity/plugging-leaks-with-a-nailgun:

   * Plug elusive, but big, leaks when exercising the places. Note that low end graphics hardware (like my i945) still has trouble keeping up with our aggresive allocations of new textures for the tiles. This triggers lots of garbage collections in the driver which causes noticiable lag in the UI. Fixing this will require more work.

   * Fix occasional slowdown of place rendering because of mem churn
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[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (kamstrup)]

I've found a way to consistently trigger this: Click Apps Place (or Files if you prefer) then, quickly, before it's completely rendered click the CoF to dismiss the place.

It may well be somehow related to the internal garbage collector of the i945 driver, but that's pure guesswork. The guess would be that once you stress the GC enough it just completely gives up. This is suspicion is further strengthened by the fact that once my virt mem goes past 700-800mb it starts leaking ~100mb *every* time I bring up a place, no matter how long time I give it. I can continue this ad OOMium.