Could be. I see mate-panel using up more and more memory day by day. It is not something you would notice unless you run for several days without rebooting.
Looks like a good cause. It may be a particular applet and I’ve added a few.
top - 06:21:57 up 0 min, 2 users, load average: 0.53, 0.20, 0.07
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3737 bill 20 0 635908 32208 22644 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.22 mate-panel
I've considered it, then I decided against it, mainly for support reasons.
But that's not important either way, MATE 1.12.1 is the one shipping with the LTS so if there happens to be a problem, it should be fixed rather than worked around.
My work machine, with 5 days of uptime:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1371 ouroumov 20 0 867572 42948 26452 S 0,0 0,3 0:10.72 mate-panel
I was wondering about that, is it possible a specific applet is to blame?
I'm using the same set of applets on all my machines:
Default everything (standard layout)
Added disk mounter applet to bottom panel
Added system monitor applet to top panel, and set it to watch CPU, RAM, NET and DISK I/O
I’ve added weather with custom animated GIF radar and a command output every 10 seconds for cat /var/run/reboot-required (I know, seems a waste). Claws mail is active in the notification area. The rest are all static launchers.
Your 5-day work machine indicates this may not be a linear creep but a burst happening all at once. Your first values were rather alarming.
The Drawer applet appears to be one culprit. Running something from the Drawer adds memory to mate-panel. There may be more because something else is making the memory values jump up a lot more.
Note the CPU usage of the parent mate-panel process.
Also note the SWAP usage: this system has an SSD with vm.swappiness=1 added to sysctl.conf.
I now think this might occur because of a weird interaction with the Eye Of Mate image viewer.
I have a massive slideshow running on one of my screens, and the CPU spikes are following the image transitions.
I will attempt to reproduce on my work machine on Monday and if I manage to do so, I will create steps to reproduce for a future bug report.
Edit: in the mean time I'm gathering some logs of top running in batch mode. I will let it run for a few hours, monitoring the eom and mate-panel memory usage and pause eom for a while to see if the memory increase correlates with the period of activity of eom.
I'd like to post the full log but it's too big for pastebin et al...
Measurements taken at 10 seconds interval for about 13 hours. @Wimpy, @lah7, what do you think?
Edit: should have killed eom before I left for the week end.
New record:
The last I had logged was 5d 6h 26m and mate-panel RES was up to 182% of original (58708/32208).
Between VirtualBox getting super-sluggish and Caja crashing on ssh/sftp (I may post about these) I had to abandon the effort and reboot. VirtualBox recovers but the Caja crashes remain frequent.
When I first boot up my Lenovo Thinkpad T400, memory usage for Ubuntu MATE 16.04 32-bit at idle is anywhere from 700-900 MB. This is incredible! Ubuntu MATE 14.04 32-bit idles at 260 MB. I have even unchecked many startup programs and it hasn’t helped. Does anyone know what is causing this?
