dbus-daemon taking up all memory (reply now and I can try to get more info)

[Yang]

I upgraded to Jaunty yesterday, left my computer, and when I came back today, the system was nearly frozen. I could barely get it to respond. Once I did manage to get in, I noticed that dbus-daemon was taking up all memory/swap. Here's the output of top:

top - 12:23:13 up 1 day, 21:43, 5 users, load average: 26.02, 27.41, 31.57
Tasks: 179 total, 1 running, 176 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 44.5%id, 55.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1025088k total, 1012736k used, 12352k free, 208k buffers
Swap: 2048276k total, 2048276k used, 0k free, 5572k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 6103 yang 20 0 1858m 718m 20 S 0 71.8 607:10.16 dbus-daemon
 6009 root 20 0 416m 47m 4208 S 0 4.7 27:29.18 Xorg
 8872 yang 39 19 837m 42m 8 D 0 4.2 435:11.47 trackerd
 1023 yang 20 0 147m 25m 64 D 0 2.5 23:29.63 opera
 3524 ntop 20 0 161m 13m 4168 S 0 1.4 8:30.82 ntop
 6240 yang 20 0 180m 7908 164 D 0 0.8 1:16.84 gnome-do
26367 yang 18 -2 8896 4744 16 S 0 0.5 0:01.71 bash
26500 yang 20 0 150m 3820 52 D 0 0.4 0:00.66 gnome-panel
26504 yang 20 0 20808 2836 128 D 0 0.3 0:00.48 gnome-screensav
 8428 yang 20 0 292m 2232 80 S 0 0.2 1:40.59 gnome-terminal
24606 root 30 10 8152 1996 8 D 0 0.2 0:00.20 landscape-sysin
31943 yang 39 19 33176 1880 12 D 0 0.2 418:44.91 tracker-indexer
25082 root 30 10 7652 1544 8 D 0 0.2 0:00.19 landscape-sysin
 6214 yang 20 0 27796 1528 12 S 0 0.1 2:14.50 compiz.real
 6244 yang 20 0 28884 1488 8 S 0 0.1 512:01.21 python
 6111 yang 20 0 7828 1476 72 D 0 0.1 0:15.39 gconfd-2
 6140 yang 20 0 159m 1428 24 S 0 0.1 0:25.69 gnome-settings-

Symptoms and how I got in: Hitting the num lock key took a number of seconds to actually toggle the num lock light. Instead of waiting for a response from the GUI, I tried switching to ctrl-alt-f2 and logging in, but I could only manage to enter my username; the password prompt never appeared on time before the login process was killed for taking too long. Finally I managed to get in via ssh and patience.

Background: I'm not sure this is related to dbus-daemon or if it's because of Tracker. After upgrading yesterday, I was getting a never-ending stream of pop-up messages from the Tracker program complaining that the index was corrupted and with the dialog buttons "Re-Index", "OK", and "Cancel" (note to UI designers: I understand what "Re-Index" means, but what are "OK" and "Cancel"?). I left my computer at that point, and when I came back today, I found it in this state.

I have left my computer in this state, in case a dev is able to reply soon and has suggestions on what other info to extract.

[Lorenzo (lorenzo-theangel)]

Same problems as you.
The only way out of it seems only restarting totally X. If you kill directly the daemon will kill also the desktop manager.
At the moment I seem to have some fortune (the daemon is stable for me in the last couple of hours at 84m), if I stop using opera as browser (I switch back to firefox, just for testing). I had notice that, if i keep loading different pictures with opera the dbus-daemon memory count keep increasing....
On the other point, I have search on different posts for linux and we are one of the few with this problem with ubuntu (or Kubuntu for me) Jaunty. We both did an update and we both use opera as a browser (not too common).
I will test my system running firefox for some day and put an update.