Possible Memory Leak in mate-panel

[Etienne Papegnies]

1) ouroumov@Box:~/Desktop$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
Release: 16.04

2) ouroumov@Box:~/Desktop$ apt-cache policy mate-panel
mate-panel:
  Installed: 1.12.2-1
  Candidate: 1.12.2-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.12.2-1 500
        500 http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

3) mate-panel memory usage should stay about constant

4) mate-panel memory usage increases over time

-------------------

Steps to reproduce:

On a dual screen system running Ubuntu MATE 16.04.1 LTS:

- Start Eye Of MATE (eom) image viewer in fullscreen slideshow mode on a folder with enough pictures that they won't all fit in cache.

    If no such folder is available, one can create one using the following commands (will take a while depending on your bandwidth and processing power):

        sudo pip install youtube-dl
        youtube-dl -f 266 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tmbeLTHC_0
        mkdir frames
        mplayer -ss 45 -vo jpeg:outdir=$PWD/frames/ NASA\ _\ Thermonuclear\ Art\ –\ The\ Sun\ In\ Ultra-HD\ \(4K\)-6tmbeLTHC_0.mp4

    This should result in a folder ./frames/ with about 40GB of HD pictures.

- Monitor Memory usage of mate-panel using the command:

        top -b -d10 -p pid | grep -E --line-buffered " pid " | tee -a out.log

    (where pid is the pid of mate-panel)

- Let it run for a few hours then use the log file to graph the resulting memory usage data, you should obtain something resembling the graph at the end of this thread: https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/possible-memory-leak-in-mate-panel/7717/15

Note: I was also monitoring eom on that graph, to correlate with mate-panel's cpu usage so the graph you obtain won't have so many lines.

[Etienne Papegnies (etienne-papegnies)]

Note: have reproduced this on a single screen machine.
Just start the slideshow in another workspace so it won't interfere with whatever you're doing.

[Etienne Papegnies (etienne-papegnies)]

Reported upstream @ https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/479

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

The GTK+ 2 part of this bug is bug 1641912 . The upstream GNOME bug suggests that apps should limit how much recent content they pull so I'm leaving this bug open in case mate-panel wants to fix that too.