gnome-terminal memory leak causes slow performance

[Rob Van Dam]

I believe this started with the upgrade to 12.10 or perhaps shortly after. I'm used to firefox using astronomical amounts of memory over time but that's not a big deal because i can just kill it and restart it and my workflow is barely interrupted. Unfortunately, gnome-terminal has no similar restore tabs capability.

As a developer, I typically keep gnome-terminal running for weeks at a time, usually with at least 4-5 tabs and often more (as of the time of this bug report I had 8 tabs open, 2 running ssh, 4 with leftover buffers from previous ssh sessions and 2 only used locally). As of this writing, I've only had this gnome-terminal window open for 4.5 days and its currently using 714 MB, second only to firefox (1GB and I just restarted it 30 minutes ago, wtf)

I do not know if the leak is related to buffers or the actual programs used. Generally speaking, I only use ssh and occasionally vi locally. If I need to do anything else locally I will open a secondary gnome-terminal window, do whatever (tail logs, restart network manager applet, etc) and then close that window. But I keep my primary gnome-terminal window which I use mostly for work open for long periods of time. But now I'm forced to restart gnome periodically to release its memory. It doesn't help that the latest versions of firefox and chrome are also all competing for fastest leak rate, often bringing my 8GB 64-bit machine to a crawl until i start killing things.

As best I can tell, closing open tabs in gnome-terminal does not reduce memory usage, only closing the window (aka terminating the process) entirely does so.

Requested info (in case ubunut-bug missed something):

Description: Ubuntu 12.10
Release: 12.10

gnome-terminal:
  Installed: 3.6.0-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 3.6.0-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 3.6.0-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/ubuntu/ quantal/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: gnome-terminal 3.6.0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-18.29-generic 3.5.7
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-18-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu6
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Nov 15 10:17:55 2012
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-terminal
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-06-18 (149 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-27 (19 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner.

Ubuntu 12.10 (quantal) reached end-of-life on May 16, 2014.

Do you still see a problem related to the one that you reported in a currently supported version of Ubuntu? Please let us know if you do and in which version of Ubuntu otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Asa Romberger (asa-romberger)]

Paul,

Thanks for getting back to me. The problem disappeared ages ago. I am
running the latest 16.04

Asa

On 12/27/18 4:59 AM, Paul White wrote:
> We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all
> reported bugs in a timely manner.
>
> Ubuntu 12.10 (quantal) reached end-of-life on May 16, 2014.
>
> Do you still see a problem related to the one that you reported in a
> currently supported version of Ubuntu? Please let us know if you do and
> in which version of Ubuntu otherwise this report can be left to expire
> in approximately 60 days time.
>
> Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.
>
> Paul White
> [Ubuntu Bug Squad]
>
> ** Changed in: gnome-terminal (Ubuntu)
> Status: Confirmed => Incomplete
>

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-terminal (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]