possible memory leak

[Feanor]

I used deja-dup 21.1 to backup and after running for 3 hours duplicity was using up about 2GB of RAM.
Could this point to a memory leak?

duplicity 0.6.17-3
arch linux

[Nate Eldredge (nate-thatsmathematics)]

I'm seeing similar behavior. I'm using duplicity directly on Ubuntu Natty i386. 0.6.16 is affected but 0.6.15 is not.

It seems to scale with the number of files. On a sample tree with 100,000 files, if you watch with top, 0.6.15's virtual size stays around 25MB throughout the run, while 0.6.16 continues to grow, finishing over 100MB. With more files the effect is more dramatic; with my regular 450,000 file backup, the machine ran out of memory (it has 2G physical and 3G swap). So this is a serious bug IMHO.

I checked some revisions on the lp:duplicity branch. It seems that this was introduced in revision 783.

[torcas (thelema-online)]

I'm having the same problem. Duplicity eats a lot of RAM going through my home folder; attaching strace to the pid reveals( as Nate observes) that the amount of files will have a negative effect on RAM usage, e.g. mailbox. 3 GB RAM + swap is allocated in a relatively short time.

Gentoo, duplicity-0.6.17

[Olivier Berger (olivierberger)]

It seems the culprit is found. A patch should be available soon. See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/duplicity-talk/2012-01/msg00037.html for more details.