Comment 12 for bug 1199877

This problem has been driving me nuts. It gets worse over time, suggesting a leak someplace. Other evidence for a leak, the unity-panel-service heap grows from 21MB on boot to 350MB or more after a few days of uptime.

I profiled the system several times using sysprof (see attached profile). The profiles consistently show that almost all time is spent in a pair of gobject methods (handlers_find() and handler_lookup()). The code in these methods traverses a linked list of 'handlers', suggesting that those lists are growing large.

Some cursory poking around in gdb confirms that the lists being traversed are very large - at least tens of thousands of elements. I'm not yet sure why they are growing so big or what's in them.