Comment 4 for bug 570015

Revision history for this message
Paul Gortmaker (paul-gortmaker) wrote : Re: High CPU usage in policykit-1

I had polkitd eat through all RAM and swap (approx 6G total) and trigger oom-killer on firefox overnight.

Seeing the above, and being long overdue for a housecleaning of dot files/directories, I started with a clean dir and only migrated key stuff I use daily directly (i.e. .gitconfig, .thunderbird .mozilla etc) --- all system stuff like gconf etc was left behind and started with a new dir given by adduser (and chown'd appropriately). That didn't help -- as polkitd has already gone back to 3GB and counting. So the "make a new user" thing did nothing here. Also audio doesn't work (not sure if that is related) on this generic dell optiplex 760.

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
13077 root 20 0 3307m 3.2g 3084 S 16 55.6 74:50.09 polkitd

I attached strace to it and it generated about 4MB of output in just a few seconds; looks like it is repeating the same thing over and over. A snippet of the 4MB log is attached.