vlc leaks memory

[Sasa Vilic]

When I watch movie on VLC memory usage starts growing until memory is full and then oom killer kills some of processes or computer eventually freezes or become very slow (due to usage of swap).

(Virtual memory usage keeps growing, while residual numbers stay relatively low)

I can reproduce this bug every time.

1. Open htop and sort processes based on memory usage
2. Start watching movie in VLC
3. Memory usage keeps growing (I have 8GB of RAM, of which initially only 1.1 GB is used)
4. I pause the player, memory usage stops growing
5. I quit VLC player, memory gets released.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: vlc 2.2.2-5
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-36.55-generic 4.4.16
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-36-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: sep4_0 socperf2_0 pax
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.1
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Sun Sep 4 21:29:20 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-01-13 (964 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Release amd64 (20131016.1)
SourcePackage: vlc
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2016-09-03 (1 days ago)

EDIT: I thought initially that this was related to video memory due to kernel log about purging GPU memory, but GPU memory usage reported in kernel was so low (circa 8 MB), that it simply couldn't be it. Thus, I removed comment about being related to kernel video memory.

[Sasa Vilic (sasavilic)]

I have tried compiling vanilla vlc, both 2.2.2 and 2.2.4 version.

1. I didn't have all libraries, so I have disabled lua and other packages were excluded by configure script. No memory leak.

2. Then I installed lua compiler and lua lib. No memory leak.

3. Then I have installed all build dependencies, with sudo apt-get build-dep vlc. I couldn't build it due to missing backport in qt5:

"You cannot build VLC with Qt-5.5.0. You need to backport I78ef29975181ee22429c9bd4b11d96d9e68b7a9c"

Based on following link, this backport should be already in ubuntu/kubuntu, so I have commented out those three lines in configure.ac. This build did leak memory.

4. I have restored original configure.at and removed qt5-dev libraries in order to force compilation with qt4 libraries. This build did also leak memory.

Check attached dpkg.log for installed libraries (some of this libraries triggers memory leak)

[Sasa Vilic (sasavilic)]

I had install from scratch my kubuntu and since then there is no memory leak in VLC. This has to do something with Kubuntu upgrade.

[Sebastian Ramacher (s-ramacher)]

Did you have libva-vdpau-gl1 installed when the leaks occurred? Which video card do you have?

[Sasa Vilic (sasavilic)]

Sorry, I can't remember if I had libva-vdpau-gl1 installed. (I also had additional problems with system, like X server consuming 100% CPU and then application stops responding to key strokes, but when if finally recovers, then it keeps generating those strokes. Typical scenario was, I edit something in writer and it blocks. When it recovers, I have two page of aaaaaaaaa, sort of thing.)

But since I am the only one reporting this issue and I don't have it after fresh installation, I guess we could simply reject this bug?

[Sebastian Ramacher (s-ramacher)]

Okay, let's close it. If it comes back, please check if you've got libvdpau-va-gl1 installed. In that case it would be the vlc vs. libvdpau-va-gl1 bug.