gnome-panel has major memory leak

[aarons]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

I'm running 8.04 x64 , and every morning I find my gnome-panel (1:2.22.1.3-0ubuntu1) taking up an absurd amount of memory. It seems to be using more than half of my 4gigs of memory and 2 gigs of swap. I have three panels running. One with just a taskbar and clock. One with only launcher buttons, and one with the following components:

menu button
deskbar applet
weather applet
clock
volume control
notification area
post-it notes
logout button
screen lock button

If I 'killall gnome-panel' a ton of my memory is freed up. Also, very often when I do this, the deskbar-applet fails to load. Usually once it fails to load, re-killing the panel will fix it.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a valgrind log following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind and attach the file to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[aarons (aarons-ubuntu)]

Ok, I followed the instructions and attached the log.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you still get the issue using the current version? the log shows an issue but you didn't install the debug variants so it has no details, could you install gnome-panel-dbgsym libgtk2.0-0-dbgsym libglib2.0-0-dbgsym libwnck22-dbgsym libcairo2-dbgsym and get a new log? what configuration do you use? do you use a background image?

[Martin Ammermüller (martin-ammermueller)]

I have this issue on a current Hardy machine (32bit, supported upgrades only). But not in such a drastic manner. I think because i'm using only 1 panel. I flagged this bug as "Confirmed", therefore. I don't know how to get a valgrind log, though, because when i kill gnome-panel it immediately gets restarted and i have no chance of starting my own with valgrind attached to it.

[Martin Ammermüller (martin-ammermueller)]

No background image, just a plain panel with clock, tasklist and systray. Sits on top edge, stretched and 25 pixels high. no auto-hide, no hide buttons. No background (system's theme).

[aarons (aarons-ubuntu)]

I do use xearth for a background image, and it updates every 10 minutes. I'm not sure what else you mean by configuration. I strongly suspect the leak is related to the deskbar applet, because I seem to remember noticing that I didn't have the huge memory usage on the occasions that it crashed and I didn't reload it. I'll install the debug packages and repost next week.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the log has no useful information, could you get another one using --show-reachable=yes and attached it to the bug?

[Martin Ammermüller (martin-ammermueller)]

Fortunately i did that already. But I had qualms to upload that much :)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the log show some extra use, how to you stop gnome-panel though? using ctrl-C to interrupt it could create wrong reports since it doesn't exit normally in this case and might not be doing the cleaning, in any case should be sent to bugzilla.gnome.org by somebody having the issue

[aarons (aarons-ubuntu)]

I've attached my log. I included the --show-reachable=yes and installed the -dbg packages before running it. gnome-panel was eating up a ton of memory this morning when I stopped the log, so there should be something in there.

[criticalmess (criticalmess)]

Hardy 64bit: Same symptomatic.
Only one panel at the bottom with just menubutton, tasklist, systray and clock. Compiz deactivated.

I discovered this with enabled auto-hide:
When panel dehides the process gnome-panel grow about 4-5 megabytes.
When panel then auto-hides it grow again at the same amount of megabytes.

This happens ongoing until reboot or kill of gnome-panel-process.

[criticalmess (criticalmess)]

I was wrong its about 1,5mb to 2,5mb auch hide or appear.
See my Valgrind log with show reachable and dpkg.

[Tina Russell (tinarussell)]

Yesterday, for me, the panel's memory usage was at 230 megabytes and counting! I'd like to help fix this bug; could someone please post or refer me to a guide for using Valgrind with the panel? Thanks!

[criticalmess (criticalmess)]

I am very sorry that i can not help exsplicit on this bug, because my memory-leak only occurs when i activate "Auto-hide" for my panel, but i won't file a bug on that. Without that, my gnome-panel process keeps running for days, without any significal memoryusage-growth.

Im not able to get any Information out of that Valgrind.log from Martin Ammermüller.

[xfls (the-x-filez)]

I have this issue too. I've attached my valgrund log of 64bit bit Ubuntu and 2d 14h uptime. gnome-panel is now usuing 181mb of ram and it is set to auto-hide. After 1-2 days uptime it's very hard to use my pc without restarting gnome-panel..

[larytet (larytet-48904418)]

I confirm the problem. Ubuntu 8.04 - the Hardy
More than 280MB of virtual memory. Restart of the gnome-panel helps
gnome-keyboard-applet is another hog with 60MB+ which is insane considering that this is just a button to switch language

[Jeff (jeffz42)]

I also have a problem with gnome-panel, memory usage skyrockets to about 2GB _resident_ before I have to logout and log back in to make sure that gnome-panel is killed and restarted. This is a major annoyance and I have been plagued by it on 7.10 and now on 8.10 too.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you still get the issue in intrepid?

[aarons (aarons-ubuntu)]

I just disabled my nightly gnome-panel killing script, so I'll let you know tomorrow if the panel is still leaking memory.

[Tina Russell (tinarussell)]

My Intrepid system's been up for about five days and 17 hours (says
"uptime"), and "gnome-panel" currently takes up 16.7MB (says the System
Monitor). So, it looks good for me! Thanks!

[aarons (aarons-ubuntu)]

well, this is what top tells me after leaving things running overnight:

PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
20 0 488m 36m 15m S 0 0.9 4:33.87 gnome-panel

So that does look much better than before.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you consider the bug fixed then in intrepid?

[aarons (aarons-ubuntu)]

Yeah, it appears to be fixed. if it ends up not actually being fixed, I'll file a new bug.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

closing the bug

[Martin Ammermüller (martin-ammermueller)]

63 megs res after 3 days on i386. A fresh one uses 18 megs. I don't think it's fixed.

[Dave Lee (davebug)]

When I rebooted yesterday (purely to reclaim memory), gnome-panel had about 230MB.
Now, after 20 hours of uptime, it's at 65MB and climbing.

So, it's clearly not fixed. How can I help to sort this?

[Bermuda (bermuda9)]

Playing around with themes increases virtual memory usage fast to over 1GB for me until I can no longer start any program from the panel any more (Some "unable to fork (oom)" message). killall -9 gnome-panel helps.

[Bermuda (bermuda9)]

Switching control themes (using System -> Preferences > Appearance -> Customize) I can reproduce this bug. When virtual memory usage is > 1.8GB I get the exact error message: Could not launch application Failed to fork (Cannot allocate memory).
Temp. solution: killall -9 gnome-panel (again for lazy googlers)

[Derek White (d-man97)]

This is still going on with fully updated (proposed & backports) Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid.

Ekiga 3.0.2 (in the tray) is also eating memory. When I restart ekiga, gnome-panel memory usage goes back down to the mid teens (normal for me).

Seems as though gnome-panel is accepting (and taking ownership of) leaked memory from other applications. Doesn't seem like a good thing for it to do...

[Borbus (borbus)]

I can confirm this is still an issue. I just noticed gnome-panel was using an incredible 498MiB! I killed it and it restarted with just 11MiB although within a few minutes it went to 12MiB. I haven't switched my gnome theme for years and when I do it doesn't seem to increase the memory usage of gnome-panel at all. I will try to keep an eye on it to see if I can figure out what triggers the high memory usage.

[fedevit (fedevit)]

Just to confirm I too have the reported bug on my OS.
Ubuntu 8.10 x86 human theme, some minor changes like moving the bar to the right of the screen.

Thank You for your work on fixing the issue, I REALLY appreciate what you are doing for us.

[Hector Caicedo (hcaicedo)]

I confirm this is an issue on Ubuntu 9.04 still. gnome-panel memory usage had killed my system. I have notice that the memory increase when switch wallpapers. I used Drapes. I tested changing wallpaper every 5 min. The memory was increasing with each new wall paper.

[Keepiru (keepiru)]

Confirmed on 9.04, VSZ=260M, RSS=186M.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

don't reopen closed bugs because you have a similar issue, open a new bug rather

[fedevit (fedevit)]

OK, got it, sorry

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 12:03, Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> wrote:

> don't reopen closed bugs because you have a similar issue, open a new
> bug rather
>
> ** Changed in: gnome-panel (Ubuntu)
> Status: Confirmed => Fix Released
>
> --
> gnome-panel has major memory leak
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/229976
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in “gnome-panel” source package in Ubuntu: Fix Released
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: gnome-panel
>
> I'm running 8.04 x64 , and every morning I find my gnome-panel
> (1:2.22.1.3-0ubuntu1) taking up an absurd amount of memory. It seems to be
> using more than half of my 4gigs of memory and 2 gigs of swap. I have three
> panels running. One with just a taskbar and clock. One with only launcher
> buttons, and one with the following components:
>
> menu button
> deskbar applet
> weather applet
> clock
> volume control
> notification area
> post-it notes
> logout button
> screen lock button
>
> If I 'killall gnome-panel' a ton of my memory is freed up. Also, very
> often when I do this, the deskbar-applet fails to load. Usually once it
> fails to load, re-killing the panel will fix it.
>

[jad_atl (sebastian-ciorba)]

Well i dunno if this is a closed bug because i didn't saw the solution here so i wanna know what is the status of this bug? it affects me too, as you can see on the attachment that i made.

sincerely, Sebastian.

[Hector Caicedo (hcaicedo)]

I upgrade to 9.10. This problem still there. When i switch the wallpapers memory usage increases till crash the system

[alekos (alekos)]

I'm on 9.10 and gnome-panel uses ~500M and all of the cpu. It may be triggered when I use google-chrome but that's just a guess at this point.

[Kenyon Ralph (kralph)]

Sounds like this bug may actually be the same as Bug #432794.