polkitd Memory leak / cpu leak

[Tazz06]

Binary package hint: policykit-1

Process polkitd get more and more cpu and memory leak.
'lsb_release -rd =>
               Description: Ubuntu 10.10
               Release: 10.10
Tasks: 184 total, 3 running, 181 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 2.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 4059252k total, 3402352k used, 656900k free, 40904k buffers
Swap: 9767484k total, 26900k used, 9740584k free, 489040k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15829 brette 20 0 19276 1360 960 R 137 0.0 0:00.10 top

5 min after :
Tasks: 184 total, 4 running, 180 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 18.8%us, 17.8%sy, 30.8%ni, 32.1%id, 0.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 4059252k total, 3433248k used, 626004k free, 41120k buffers
Swap: 9767484k total, 26900k used, 9740584k free, 489864k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
30145 root 22 2 1909m 1.8g 3128 R 70 46.9 36:17.76 polkitd

----
Here are more detailed results of
"/bin/ps -eo sz,rss,vsize,pid,ni,pri,pcpu,pmem,stat,comm"
Date/Time SZ RSS VSZ PID NI PRI %CPU %MEM STAT COMMAND
ps.20101224-1540: 2151 5828 8604 1746 0 19 0.1 0.5 S polkitd
ps.20101225-2040:20141 77852 80564 1746 0 19 0.1 7.5 S polkitd
(I have a record available if useful taken every hour)
The increase seems unrelated to machine/user load. It continue to grow for ever,
slowing more and more all processes and killing the system in the end...

[Juan Cañete (jcazor)]

Aplying workaround from bug #572813 didn't solve the problem.

[Tazz06 (steph-brette)]

bug #572813 didn't solve the problem.
I must kill process all 1 hour :(

[Tazz06 (steph-brette)]

i have this error in my log file :( all the time)

7Oct 22 13:37:20 brette-laptop pulseaudio[15012]: module.c: module-detect is deprecated: Please use module-udev-detect instead of module-detect!
Oct 22 13:37:20 brette-laptop pulseaudio[15012]: module-detect.c: failed to detect any sound hardware.
Oct 22 13:37:20 brette-laptop pulseaudio[15015]: module.c: module-detect is deprecated: Please use module-udev-detect instead of module-detect!
Oct 22 13:37:20 brette-laptop pulseaudio[15015]: module-detect.c: failed to detect any sound hardware.
Oct 22 13:37:20 brette-laptop pulseaudio[15018]: module.c: module-detect is deprecated: Please use module-udev-detect instead of module-detect!

[Brandon Williams (opensource-subakutty)]

I also have this problem on 10.10. The 10.04 install that I upgraded from did not have this problem.

It has nothing to do with pulseaudio, since I don't even have pulseaudio installed. Therefore, the work-arounds suggested elsewhere don't help.

[Brandon Williams (opensource-subakutty)]

In my case, high memory/CPU utilization in polkitd and CPU utilization in dbus was the result of repeated calls to nm-tool that I was making in conky to determine my wireless essid. In previous versions, this was not a problem, and there is clearly a memory leak in polkitd associated with this. However, I can work around the problem by dropping the calls to nm-tool from my conky config.

[error121 (error121)]

I too am having run away memory usage from the polkitd service. I have to kill it every few hours or my computer becomes responsive. top shows

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 1635 root 20 0 324m 275m 3124 S 0 7.0 5:07.36 polkitd

 I am using 11.04 x64 on an Intel T9400.

I can post more info if necessary.

[Peter Johnson (missinglink)]

Confirmed, I suffer the same issue:

System becomes unresponsive.

When running 'top', the process 'polkitd' is listed at top, taking anything from 40%-90% memory (I have 4GB installed)
When the process it killed via 'sudo kill {pid}' the system becomes responsive again.

I am running Ubuntu on a laptop, which I suspend overnight, not sure if this is any way related.

$ uname -r
2.6.35-23-generic-pae

cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 10.10 \n \l