Comment 110 for bug 148454

I am running Ubuntu 9.10 on AMD 64-bit and I have this bug. I disagree with those who say the resource waste from this bug is negligible because at least in my case I have 64 instances of this process, each of which are using over 122MB of RAM, 117MB of which is virtual. That's a total of over 7.6GB for a set of processes that have no discernable purpose. If it's supposed to be monitoring terminals including pseudoterminals, it t seems strange that it would be starting so many instances. It's even more egregious if it is supposed to be monitoring real ttys.
Even if you wanted to monitor a bunch of terms, wouldn't it make more sense to spawn a more conservative, perhaps configurable, number of processes at the outset and spawn more as needed? That's basically the model for programs like Apache and, if memory serves, sshd. If it's good enough there it would seem it should be good enough here.
At the very least we should have a better explanation of why this daemon is deemed necessary so we can seek alternatives, or have some workaround. I'll try killing the processes, but it seems to me that just killing off all the processes for a program that is poorly understood, at the very least killing all instead of some, is a poor administrative solution.
I've been having performance problems as well, and I have to wonder if at least part of the problem is not due to this. At the very least that much memory being used is a problem, and I originally sought out answers when I needed to free up some memory.