Uses up too much memory when starting partitioner, kills nautilus

[Matthew Garrett]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

When starting the partitioner on a 256MB system, the system runs out of memory. This typically seems to choose to kill nautilus (it uses a lot of memory and it's generally idle), which then restarts itself and opens a filesystem window. The rest of the install seems to be fine.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

What version of the CD were you using? Or version of ubiquity? Or any helpful information? :-)

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

Oops, sorry! It's the same version as my other reports - the one on the daily 20060519.

[Alexandre Otto Strube (surak)]

This happens here for dapper final for amd64. It keeps killing the panels, and cannot disable swaps.

[Nick_Hill (nick-nickhill)]

Under Gutsy tribe 5, system with 256Mb RAM, Ubiquity hangs on "installing system" "Detecting file systems".

This appears to happen when the swap space on the device being re-partitioned is disabled, leaving too little virtual memory for Ubiquity to continue. I see a similar behaviour with a drive without partition defined, therefore no virtual memory.

Adding an additional 128Mb solves the problem. The memory issue makes Ubiquity unusable on systems with 256Mb or less RAM.

[jhansonxi (jhansonxi)]

I am also encountering this issue with Ubuntu Gutsy Tribe 5. System with 256MB RAM hangs at 15% during "Detecting file systems". Adding an additional 128MB stick fixes the problem. This does not occur with Kubuntu or Xubuntu. Note: System does not have integrated video and is using a Matrox G400 AGP video card.

[jhansonxi (jhansonxi)]

May be a duplicate of Bug #105682

[jhansonxi (jhansonxi)]

Regarding Bug #105682 I should point out that I am using the i386 LiveCD on a Celeron system and not 64-bit version.

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

I've noticed, that in Ubuntu Gutsy ubuntu developers included deskbar-applet in default gnome-panel configuration and this applet uses a lot of memory (more than nautilus). It seems this applet should be removed from default configuration if we want to have Ubuntu running on computers, having 256 MB RAM (especially on computers with 256 RAM having integrated video cards, like Intel or ATI/AMD, which often steals 16-64 MB memory from main RAM).
So, maybe this bug should be assigned to gnome-panel package (AFAIK default panel configuration lives there, right?) ?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The Live CD for Hardy Heron provides a menu option for "Install Ubuntu" that will run ubiquity without launching a full desktop environment. I have tested this with 256MB of memory and was able to install successfully, while the "Try Ubuntu" menu item requires 384MB of memory. Would anybody else mind testing this? Thanks in advance.

[Evan (ev)]

I also Investigated the minimum memory requirement for only-ubiquity mode. I did this by using a hard disk image without a swap partition and elected to not create one as part of partitioning. Somewhat strict requirements, and without them ubiquity runs comfortably with 256MB of RAM. Unfortunately, without swap it consistently OOMs while copying files when using 256MB of RAM.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This issue has sat incomplete for more than 60 days now. I'm going to close it as invalid. Please feel free re-open if this is still an issue for you. Thank you.