Empathy causes memory leak on Openfire Server

[David Harper]

Binary package hint: empathy

I'm not sure if this is related to the server or the client, so I have also reported it here as well: http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/196905 . I've found another user on the previous link with the same issue.

Since upgrading to 9.10a6+ we've encountered memory leaks on the Openfire server when Empathy is connected to it using the XMPP plugin. Memory usage keeps increasing until the server falls over. Obviously this isn't good! The server is configured with 768MB of RAM for Java and only has 60 users so should be more than capable to handle this.

I'm concerned for when 9.10 final is released and the rest of my department gets moved from Pidgin to Empathy by default.

I'm not sure what additional information I can give you for this, so if you could let me know that'd be cool. (Server logs? Empathy logs?)

[ChrisGaeth (chris-gaeth)]

I can confirm seeing this as well, and I was the only user utilizing Empathy connecting to our server,

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. The issue is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug the to the people writting the software (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME)

[Laurent Bigonville (bigon)]

Discussion on openfire forum: http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/196905

[Laurent Bigonville (bigon)]

I would say it's a telepathy-gabble (or of course openfire) issue

[davenz (davekoelmeyer)]

I can confirm seeing an identical issue, specifically implicating Empathy on Ubuntu Linux 9.10 x86 connecting to OpenFire 3.6.4.

Further updates in this thread:

http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/196905

Excerpt from one of my posts:

"In this case I was able to expend JVM memory completely in about five (5) minutes from bringing the OF server up - simply by repeatedly exiting and launching Empathy rapidly. This was with one user (me), with the remaining three or so users...using Spark or Pidgin"

I can reproduce this consistently. Pidgin 2.6.2 and Spark 2.5.8 clients don't result in this behaviour.

Cheers,
Dave

[Brian Curtis (bcurtiswx)]

We are still waiting for someone experiencing this bug to report it upstream as per Sebastiens instructions.

[David Harper (inquisitivedave)]

I reported it upstream to Gnome, who marked it as Invalid and forwarded me onto freedesktop.org's mailing list (3 different bug trackers... yay!)

I had some messaged from Sjoerd there:
"I read through the bugreport, but it doesn't seem like a clear cause has been
identified. From our side of the fence this is quite hard to debug (as in, it's
hard to guess what behaviour in Gabble would trigger this issue without knowing
openfire)."

The telepathy-gabble list @ freedesktop is the correct place although without knowing how to help them get the data they need, I cannot submit the bug.

[David Harper (inquisitivedave)]

Gnome bug was: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=598522

[Brian Curtis (bcurtiswx)]

Ok, the upstream reporting for telepathy-gabble is at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ . Please file this bug there.

[Jordan (jordanu)]

From one of the openfire developers:

"I think I've uncovered the cause of the problem. It appears to be Openfire's implementation of XEP-0163 "Personal Eventing Protocol."

As a workaround, you can disable PEP by adding this Openfire System Property (you can add/modify properties through the Openfire Admin console):

The property xmpp.pep.enabled should be set to: false" ( later adding that you may have to reboot the server for this to take effect )

http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/198476;jsessionid=550495838E366C002CE290988A757297#198476

[Ilan (ilan)]

Did a telepathy-gabble bug report get opened for this? Does anyone know if this is resolved in Lucid?

[Laurent Bigonville (bigon)]

I think (not 100% sure) that this fixed in lucid.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

marking this fixed per bigon's comment. if its still an issue in Lucid feel free to open this bug again.

[AlexConrad (aconrad-tlv)]

I am using Lucid and Empathy takes up a lot of memory after a long time running (a whole day, week-end). I think I noticed this since I configured Empathy to be my IRC client. I join 6 to 8 channels through 2 servers (one of them is SSL encrypted), all with pretty low activity. I removed one of my channels, #python on Freenode, that has high activity and looked like it was growing in memory too fast.