Packagekitd eating RAM, CPU

[Antti Haapala]

Since updating to saucy, packagekitd seems to eat all my memory, turning computer sluggish. If I kill it it respawns soon and quickly eats half the RAM. I have seen even seen VM size > 10G, with resident set sizes of 1-3G, way too much for a computer with 4G of RAM.

I do not know how to debug the issue; however looking at the /proc/pid/fd shows something even more dubious, there are 578 open file descriptors to files in /var; all apt-lists and /var/lib/dpkg/status are opened with 12 filedescriptors? Also, /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin seems to be memmapped quite some many times:

7f3b660c6000-7f3b68494000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1246201 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
7f3b68c95000-7f3b6b063000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1246201 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
7f3b6b864000-7f3b6dc32000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1246201 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
7f3b6dc32000-7f3b70000000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1246201 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
7f3b744f9000-7f3b768c7000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1246201 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
7f3b79496000-7f3b7b864000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3b7b864000-7f3b7dc32000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3b7dc32000-7f3b80000000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3b85c32000-7f3b88000000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3b8c928000-7f3b8ecf6000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3b928c7000-7f3b94c95000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3b95496000-7f3b97864000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3b97864000-7f3b99c32000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3b99c32000-7f3b9c000000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3ba08c3000-7f3ba2c91000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3ba6862000-7f3ba8c30000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3ba9431000-7f3bab7ff000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3bb02f0000-7f3bb26be000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3bb26be000-7f3bb4a8c000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3bb4a8c000-7f3bb6e5a000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3bbb0cf000-7f3bbd49d000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3bbe342000-7f3bc0710000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3bc15b5000-7f3bc3983000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3bc4828000-7f3bc6bf6000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)
7f3bc7864000-7f3bc9c32000 rw-p 00000000 fc:08 1245278 /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin (deleted)

----

Description: Ubuntu 13.10
Release: 13.10

packagekit:
  Installed: 0.8.10-2ubuntu2
  Candidate: 0.8.10-2ubuntu2
  Version table:
 *** 0.8.10-2ubuntu2 0
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ saucy/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Quinn Balazs (qbalazs)]

If you would, please collect memory forensics using valgrind. Use the instructions here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind, and post the resultant valgrind.log(s). After this has been done and uploaded, set the status here back to new and someone will take a look at it.

Thanks,
Quinn Balazs

[Antti Haapala (ztane)]

Here is the valgrind log; I wrapped the packagekitd with a shell script wrapper.

The process seems to have died/finished many times over the day by itself, but now at 23:08 it shows

root 24963 85.8 65.9 6955452 2670212 ? Sl 20:41 124:44 /usr/bin/valgrind.bin -v --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full --num-callers=40 --log-file=/tmp/valgrind.log /usr/lib/packagekit/packagekitd.real

-> Killed.

[Quinn Balazs (qbalazs)]

Sorry it's taken me a bit to get around to looking through the logs. Something does seem a bit strange, so on that basis this is confirmed. I'm going to take a look at them today, and should have some idea of what is going on a bit later.

[PJW (peter-isoc)]

Today I noticed the packagekitid process using more than 12% CPU
Had to kill it to get my system up to speed again.

I have the distinct impression there is an interference with Firefox somewhere.

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

This should be resolved and since 1.2.6 the daemon will even shutdown again when not in use.