Massive Evolution Mail memory leak

[Mitchell]

While there are lots of posts on Evolution memory leaks, this appears to be new. No Natty, evolution starts with around 60mb of usage, and climbs up. Over the past 90 minutes it reached 385mb. Finally killed it. Restarting goes back to the 60mb again. I ran it this time from the command line with: evolution --debug-file=

Here is the contents of this file:

----------------------
(evolution:2239): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: Object class EMFolderTree doesn't implement property 'paste-target-list' from interface 'ESelectable'

(evolution:2239): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: Object class EMFolderTree doesn't implement property 'copy-target-list' from interface 'ESelectable'

(firefox-bin:8739): LIBDBUSMENU-GTK-CRITICAL **: dbusmenu_menuitem_property_set_shortcut: assertion `gtk_accelerator_valid(key, modifier)' failed
** (<unknown>:9247): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (<unknown>:9247): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (<unknown>:9247): DEBUG: NP_Shutdown
NOTE: child process received `Goodbye', closing down
NOTE: child process received `Goodbye', closing down
java version "1.6.0_22"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.10.2) (6b22-1.10.2-0ubuntu1~11.04.1)
OpenJDK Server VM (build 20.0-b11, mixed mode)

(firefox-bin:8739): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_source_remove: assertion `tag > 0' failed

(firefox-bin:8739): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_source_remove: assertion `tag > 0' failed
----------------

No idea what's going on here. If I don't kill evolution regularly my ram gets eaten up and my system freezes. I have uninstalled evolution with the 'purge' option, and reinstalled. I then restored evolution from previously backed up settings, so it's possible there's some problem in my settings. But where? I have 4 imap+ accounts running, plus a pop service. There are about 60 emails in each account, with more archived in a local folder on my computer. I have about 5 local calendars, all measured in kb of data. Any thoughts as to what's going on? I'm aware that Ubuntu is ditching evolution for the next release, so need a work around until then. Cheers.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: evolution 2.32.2-0ubuntu7
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-10.46-generic 2.6.38.7
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-10-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Aug 8 10:59:41 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_AU:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evolution
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[osprey (theosprey)]

I confirm, the beheaviour. With a fresh installed 11.04 ubuntu and unity evolution is taking more and more ram as messages are loaded. I can clearly see the increase of memory usage when I read a mail or change tabs around in the application.

[Mitchell (curious-mitchell)]

Yeah, I've switched to thunderbird 5. Works beautifully, and my netbook
is fast again. Pity about Evolution. Is this likely to be fixed anytime
soon?

On Fri 12 Aug 2011 04:42:16 EST, Launchpad Bug Tracker wrote:
> ** Changed in: evolution (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Confirmed

[osprey (theosprey)]

Some addition to the bug scenario:
I've fresh installed ubuntu 11.04 on a new laptop, then I backed up all my evolution data from the old laptop and imported the backup onto the new one. After that operation evolution on the new laptop started to eat up ram in horrible way, taking around 100MB of memory for each message opened, and never freeing memory.
So I've cleaned the configuration files of evolution and the locally downloaded mails. After this step evolution seems to does not eat up memory by simply opening messages.
Before the operation it was leaking about 100MB of memory for each message opened.
The removed files to clean up config and downloaded messages are
~/.evolution
~/.local/share/evolution
~/.config/evolution

The memory leak could be related to the big quantity of locally stored messages (around 2Gb), or with a setting coming from the old setup that triggered a bug in evolution.
Is there a way to test whatever setting caused the issue?

[zakunin (zakunin)]

Same problem in ubuntu 10.10 with an heavy use of evolution; I have submitted the bug here too: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662030

[Malte Finsterwalder (m-launchpad-finsterwalder-spamgourmet-com)]

On Ubuntu 12.04 this problem still persists.
Leaving my machine running over night kills it, because evolution uses >12GB of memory!
I would classify this bug high, since it makes evolution de facto unusable.

[osprey (theosprey)]

Malte,
I know that it's an annoyance, but could you try the workaround I've used to get evolution back working?
The memory leak is probably related to some obscure settings or something messed up during updates.

I was affected by the problem on 11.04, but after cleaning up the configuration files I was no more affected by this memory leak. Since that time I've also upgraded to 11.10 and then to 12.04 without issues related to evolution.

[Allan Bogh (ajbogh)]

I'm not sure if this is directly related but I notice a massive memory link with writing email with HTML content, such as pasted content from a webpage. This also applies to images that are inserted, as these create HTML containers around the images, thus causing a leak.

The leak is apparent when pressing backspace after HTML content has been inserted. Typing is fast and responsive, but backspace takes one to two seconds to complete. It's often faster to highlight and delete than to press backspace.

This leak causes sending of messages to freeze the window, causing it to grey out.

As a final note, I've found that including a signature and attempting to delete it will crash Evolution instantly, although this may be an unrelated bug.

Setup:

Evolution 3.16 or 3.17 (needed latest development release to fix previous bugs)
Exchange plugin
Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 - 8GB Ram
Ubuntu 15.04

[dino99 (9d9)]

This version has expired long ago. If that issue persist with the actual active ubuntu releases, then open a new report via ubuntu-bug