evulution leaks memory

[paraiko]

Binary package hint: evolution

When evolution is left open it slowly eats the available memory (I have often seen >2GiB of memory usage by the evolution process ) and swap space. Sometimes it crashes all by itself, sometimes I have quit the program or kill the process. because the system comes to a craw because of the heavy swap usage.

Even if this is not a memory leak I still have the impression that evolution has a "rather big" memory footprint...

Ubuntu version :
Description: Ubuntu maverick (development branch)
Release: 10.10
(Amd 64)

Kernel version:
2.6.35-22-generic

evolution version:
  Installed: 2.30.3-1ubuntu6
  Candidate: 2.30.3-1ubuntu6

I'm attaching the logfiles of 2 Valgrind-evolution runs.
---
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Release Candidate amd64 (20100419.1)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: evolution 2.30.3-1ubuntu6
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.33-generic 2.6.35.4
Tags: maverick
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[paraiko (paraiko)]

apport information

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, that's something to send to bugzilla.gnome.org by someone affected by the issue.

[Brian J. Murrell (brian-interlinx)]

I see the same thing here. Evolution starts out at about 360MB of VM and before long (i.e. less than 24h) it gets an ENOMEM as it bumps up against the 1GB ulimit imposed here.

[Paul Done (pkdone)]

I am getting this problem too on a fresh install of the full public Maverick Ubuntu release.

Release: 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) - (x86-64)

$ uname -a
Linux pdone-thinkpad 2.6.35-22-generic #34-Ubuntu SMP Sun Oct 10 09:26:05 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I have 8GB of RAM, Evolution has been running for about 2 hours and currently its consuming 6.9 GB RAM!

[Aleksander Morgado (aleksander-m)]

The issue seems to be in the Tracker plugin for Evolution. Could you reproduce the bug after having installed the tracker debug symbols?

[BigBadBassMan (d-reiche)]

absolutely reproduceable. I have 8GB RAM, and evolution eats it away within under 5 minutes

on my system Evolution starts with ~1GB virtual space, 71M RES, and in seconds increases virtual to 8.5GB and RES to 800M

after kill -15 and restart, evolution requests around 4GB Virtual mem, but keep ~ 5% real memory. probably because no new messages have been retrieved in second start?

also disk activity is enormous, when evo is loaded.

[paraiko (paraiko)]

I can add the following:

I have recently cleaned up my servers Imap account (which means going down from >6500 Emails in the Inbox to just over 1000) Since then I have not experienced the memory leak in Evolution anymore, nor have I seen enormous Tracker activity.

I can confirm that I also had a lot of tracker activity when I still had the problem.

If someone else with the problem can add a valgrind log with the tracker-dbg info that would be great. That would save me moving back several 100's of MiB's of mail to my inbox, trying to reproduce the issue. If there's no one else available just let me know and I will see what I can do.

[BigBadBassMan (d-reiche)]

I have installed tracker-dbg and made a valgrind run of evolution.

Strangely, evolution does not always eat up all available memory. During this run, it kept at around 4GB Virtual and 16% Real (making it 1.3GB of real RAM on my 8GB machine.) Don't know if this has something to do with valgrind.

Although, I have noticed before that time between start of Evolution and unresponsiveness of the system (due to lack of free RAM) greatly vary. Seems to be dependent on the number of new messages, or the last time Evolution opened up a Mailbox.

Nevertheless, 1.3GB RAM usage just for 2 POP Accounts and 3 IMAP Accounts as well as ~10 CalDAV Calendars far too much.

[Brian J. Murrell (brian-interlinx)]

I don't have tracker installed on my machine (IMHO, compared to what beagle was in it's hay-day, tracker's quite substandard -- it's always given me trouble and never finds what I am looking for anyway) and i still have a severely leaking evolution.

[Phil FRARY (phil-frary-nthdimension-deactivatedaccount)]

I'm experiencing the same problem with a fresh install of 10.10
Evolution gradually consumes more and more RAM but seems to stop at 1.6 GB
I don't have the tracker plugin installed.
I'm using one IMAP account and two local calendars.
The system is still usable but sluggish.

[BigBadBassMan (d-reiche)]

seems to be fixed in 2.30.3-1ubuntu7.1 from maverick-proposed.

at least evolution does not crash randomly, and memory consumption back to sane amounts.
left evolution running overnight and it is still open, when i came to my desk. Hooray!

[Brian J. Murrell (brian-interlinx)]

I can't agree with BigBadBassMan. I still see daily memory consumption and crashes even with 2.30.3-1ubuntu7.2.

[Tommy Fogwell (tommy-fogwell)]

I also disagree with BigBadBassMan. Evolution consumes masses of my RAM. Also don't have tracker installed.

Ubuntu 10.10
Evolution version: 2.30.3-1ubuntu7.2

uname -a
Linux tommy-notebook 2.6.35-23-generic #41-Ubuntu SMP Wed Nov 24 11:55:36 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[Tommy Fogwell (tommy-fogwell)]

I updated today from update manager, some libs were updated and evolution RAM usage stable at ~40MB. The leak was definitely in a lib.

Well done!

[maros84 (mdabrowski84)]

I had to disable Visual Assistance from the Startup Application tool. This fixed all of my issues with evolution and the whole GNOME. Memory usage was quite high in some situations and this thing removed it completely.

It looks like Visual Assistance tool is causing some issues in gtk.

[Ivan Frederiks (idfred)]

Ubuntu 11.04 i386
Evolution 2.32.2-0ubuntu7
Visual Assistance disabled.

Still leaks. Valgrind log attached.

[Craig Brash (craigbrash)]

have same problem each time i change to a different item in my inbox memory use goes up by a couple of hundred megs until all memory is used up.

[Phil Ayres (ayres-phil)]

I'm struggling with the same problem. In case it helps others make a connection, I'm using IMAP to pull from two Google email accounts, calendar and contacts. I am not using any other email accounts in Evolution, so I think this might help to limit the scope a little.

Just simply running htop while using the program seems to indicate a jump in memory usage every time I open an email (even if I have opened it previously). Also, I have just forced Evolution to download all my messages for Offline Mode, and memory is staying pretty much flat. These both suggest that it is an email opening / formatting issue (the formatting message when an email is opened is up for much too long in my opinion, even with a very simple email).

I upgraded from 10.04 to 10.10 to 11.04 in the last week, so I know that things should be very up to date.

Just in case it matters, I'm using an ext4 partition with ecryptfs encrypted home directory. I only mention the encryption, since it has crashed Open Office since the day I set it up, and appears to have strange effects when programs start to swap.

I'm not using Tracker, but am using Google Desktop for search, just in case that actively hooks into Evolution in some way.

I've never touched Valgrind, but if somebody could point me at an easy guide to set it up against Evolution I'd be happy to give it a test.

Phil

[juri (eng-juri)]

I am having the same problem with evolution.
I am using evolution with Exchange server through evolution-mapi plugin.
It start normaly and after 3-4 it consumes aprox 3GB of ram just for sitting there and doing nothing.
I must mention that it has e big problem with opening HTML email when the email is long with many threds.(it does not open it at all)

kernel 3.2.0-27-generic
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

[Jörg Frings-Fürst (jff-de)]

change status to Fix released (see gnome-bugs)