indicator-datetime uses excessive memory

[Robie Basak]

On my Aquaris 4.5, OTA-13, indicator-datetime 15.10+15.04.20160820.1-0ubuntu1, it uses too much RSS. A typical RSS is 315892, almost three times as much as unity8.

I believe this is an OTA regression. I'm not sure if it regressed from OTA-11 or OTA-12.

Just now, I got caught in an oom killer loop with constant killing of unity8-dash because of this, making my phone unusable. I had to kill indicator-datetime manually. It then restarted automatically and now uses 80456 RSS only. I see bug 1633319 exists complaining about a memory leak. It's not exactly the same version since mine is 15.10+15.04.20160820.1-0ubuntu1 and that one is 15.10+16.10.20160820.1-0ubuntu1. But perhaps the upstream versions are the same or something? Perhaps the two are dupes, but I'll let someone more familiar make that determination.

I have only a handful of alarms (perhaps five on average; rarely more) but I do have my Google calendar syncing with perhaps hundreds of events. However, there's no reason that this should cause indicator-datetime to use more RSS; it shouldn't be keeping these in memory.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Crimbo (ckhatton)]

This seems to have been resolved now, since running a system update on Yakkety via 'Ubuntu Software'. Can anyone else confirm the same?

[Crimbo (ckhatton)]

Scrap that... I realised it was because I had the 'indicator-datetime-service' package set to 'stop' in the system monitor (which is a great temporary fix if anyone is having this same issue).

[machadoug (machadoug)]

Still having this issue with Ubuntu 17.10.
Disabled the option to Show clock in the menu bar and it still causes the issue.
Iǜe also set the time manually instead of Automatically from the internet and it has no effect.
Does anyone have a workaround?

[Crimbo (ckhatton)]

@rael-gc is experiencing this issue still with 18.04 on duplicate bug post...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-datetime/+bug/1652789

[ai_ja_nai (albertomassidda)]

Confirm that this bug is still alive and kicking on Ubuntu 20.04.
This effectively prevents using Ubuntu as a business OS...

[Jeff Silverman (jeffsilverm)]

ai_ja_nai (albertomassidda), while it is true that the bug is still alive and kicking, there is a way to work around the issue. See bug 1652789, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-datetime/+bug/1652789/comments/4 . https://askubuntu.com/questions/876524/how-do-i-begin-to-diagnose-and-fix-indicator-datetime-service-using-100-cpu-and#1022408 describes, in a fairly detailed way, how to disable the local calendar from the online calendar.