Awful memory leaks when using image editing software

[EliCoten]

Whenever I use image editing software I the whole system basically grinds to a halt after a little use (not more than a few minutes normally).

It doesn't make much difference which software I use - the problem happens with Gimp, Inkscape, Dia and Shutter (when editing the image). However the problem does not occur with LibreOffice Draw.

Using htop I notice that the cache figure starts to increase very rapidly with every edit/brush stroke that I make, until it uses up the entire available memory and the entire swap partition. And understandably, with no free working memory left, the computer is completely unresponsive.

This is quite a severe problem because it means that I can't use this computer for any image editing and if I make a mistake the whole computer will lockup and I could potentially lose unsaved data in other open applications.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: gimp 2.8.10-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-24.47-generic 3.13.9
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-24-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3
Architecture: i386
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Mon May 26 23:56:55 2014
SourcePackage: gimp
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2014-04-19 (36 days ago)

[EliCoten (launchpad-elicoten)]

For reference I've posted a related question to see if I can do some more investigation myself here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/533052/how-to-find-and-report-memory-leak

Meanwhile it seems to be shared memory that is leaking so I'm wondering if it is actually a problem in the X Server or graphics driver? (Although it's only drawing applications that seem to suffer from the problem).