'mate-indicator-applet' using 5GB+ RAM?

Support & Help Requests
1

UbuntuMATE 18.04
Linux Kernel 4.15.0-20-generic x86_64
MATE 1.20.1

So I thought I was having problems with memory allocation relating to virtualbox but after consulting with 'glances' I see that 'mate-indicator-applet' is using ~65% of my total memory, which works out somewhere around 5GB! This has happened twice now and the first time it was even worse as far as memory consumption goes... I didn't realize that mate-indicator-applet was to blame at the time but my system was close to crashing with my 7.67GB of RAM pretty much full and my swap partition halfway there!

After issuing the following command:
...$ kill -9 <PID of mate-indicator-applet>
My memory usage immediately drops back down to normal levels.

I searched around but didnt really find anything that seems to match up with what I am experiencing..
Anybody have any ideas as to how to maybe fix this or even some kind of work-around?

I'm more than happy to report back with additional info if needed, thanks in advance!

EDIT

Found a screenshot of the first occurance:

12GB_memory_ERROR-CRITICAL.png706×532 53.2 KB

2

You can sort in the second tab, (processes) by the memory column to see the top offenders.

my screenshot (if it helps)

Screenshot at 2018-05-12 13-05-15.png1093×917 203 KB

1 Like
3

Hmmm… I’ve seen a similar issue when using the notifications tray applet (Which is different but serves similar type of purpose). There are reports of this on Fedora, and especially when running wine.

Are there any specific apps that you were running that showed up in the applet at the time of the memory issue?

We’ve been trying to debug/fix this without much success over the past few days…

4

The only thing that I can think of, that isn’t a native app, is that I had installed Diodon (clipboard mngr)

diodon/bionic,now 1.8.0-1 amd64 [installed]

…but on the flip side of that coin, Iirc I don’t believe that I had installed it yet when this happened the first time. I could be remember wrong tho

5

Thanks! I noticed that after I posted lol
I’m a little new to MATE/Gnome2 if you cant tell. Coming over from KDE Neon, which I really liked, except for the fact that after certain updates, grub may or may not boot.

6

After restarting the mate-indicator-applet I noticed that the memory allocated to it steadily goes up at a rate of about 1MB every couple of seconds or so.

Not sure if the site will let me but I will try to upload a small video showing this…

7

really wish I could get this fixed… I really like the MATE DE but looks like I might be better off reverting to 16.04 or just scrap *buntu alltogether…

8

Unfortunately I use Fedora and the problem is present too. I saw a report upstream already. Hopefully it’ll get fixed soon.

9

If anybody else happens to run into this issue, this is how I worked around the problem:

First, I wrote a simple shell start-up script that auto-kills the ‘mate-indicator-applet’ upon start-up.

...$ vim <script-name>.sh

#!/bin/bash
kill | ps aux | grep [m]ate-indicator-applet | awk '{print $2}'
# the square brackets '[ ]' ensure that grep doesnt match against itself

Im sure pgrep/pkill would be easier but I can never seem to get that method to work for some reason. Prob something I dont quite understand about how pgrep/pkill works.

...$ sudo chmod a+x <script-name>.sh

There are many ways to make a script execute at startup but I just added the following entry into the system wide crontab:
(This would prob still work by adding this to the user’s crontab as well, i.e. ‘…$ crontab -e’. In this case, you would want to exclude the ‘root’ part of this entry. Considering that the ‘mate-indicator-applet’ is a user process this should still work fine.)

...$ sudo vim /etc/crontab

@reboot    root    /path/to/script/<script-name>.sh

Now that the ‘mate-indicator-applet’ is no longer sucking all of the RAM out of our system we need to figure out a way to replace some of the more important indicator applets. My main concern was in replacing the battery status icon as well as the wifi/ethernet functionality. Here was my solution:

Fixing the battery icon is easy. All one needs to do is right-click on the panel and click the ‘Add to Panel…’ option. On my system, the battery charge monitor is right at the top of the list.

Fixing the wifi/ethernet connectivity isn’t quite as simple, but is still really easy. I opted to use ‘wicd’ (pronounced like ‘wicked’), although im sure there are plenty of alternatives out there. ‘connman’ comes to mind… it actually saved my bacon on a kde system a while back.

...$ sudo apt install wicd

If this doesn’t include ‘wicd-gtk’, I recommend installing it manually.

Then simply add the wicd applet in the same way that you did the battery charge monitor.

My long term solution was to switch back to ubuntuMATE 16.04 for the time being.