VLC freezes the whole system eating up the whole RAM

[zsolt.ruszinyák]

Binary package hint: vlc

At first I thought the problem was that I use "LADSPA Plugin Multiband EQ" output. Using this freezes everything when playing anything in VLC immediately, when I switched to the default output, it could play for some time, and then again, everything froze. I didn't have any problems with VLC in previous releases of Ubuntu.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: vlc 1.1.9-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu May 5 23:42:11 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: vlc
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[mime (michael+launchpad-mimeit)]

I can confirm this bug. It happened to me while watching a 720p.mkv movie file and switching between vlc and chromium-browser.
vlc eats up the whole free memory, Ubuntu starts to swap, Hard Disk is busy, took me about 5 minutes to open a console and kill vlc. Then I was able to use my laptop as usual.

[mcarrera (mcarrera00-gmail)]

Same here, VLC takes 88% of memory (4GB) according to top, creating a lot of swapping and freezing the system. After killing the process things go back to normal.
Unfortunately the bug is not consistent, it occurs I'd say 30% of the time.

[zsolt.ruszinyák (zsolt-ruszinyak)]

I can say that with the "LADSPA Plugin Multiband EQ" output it happens all the time and immediately! With the default output, as MCARRERA says, less often, but still, it does.

[Eric Dalquist (eric-dalquist)]

I'm seeing this randomly as well while listening to streaming radio. All of a sudden VLC will consume as much memory as possible. I have to ssh to the machine and kill -9 the vlc process which is quite slow due to the lack of memory.

System: Linux bohemia 2.6.38-8-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr 11 03:31:24 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
8GB RAM

Listening to: http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/KROQFMDIALUP.pls

[abnqeut (abnqeut)]

This sometimes happens to me too. It happens while playing video files, but not every time and not with just a few files. When it happens it always seems to be in the first minute or two of the video.