Possible memory leak in mate-panel?

ouroumov 2016-07-25 11:00:41 UTC #7

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

Bill_MI 2016-07-25 11:11:01 UTC #8

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.

Dave_Barnes 2016-07-25 15:49:52 UTC #9

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.

v3xx 2016-07-26 20:31:43 UTC #10

Well, I just went back to square one. Popped the circuit breaker and took out my box.

I did look at it last night and did see a small (insufficient) rise in ram.

Starting over

Edit:
Just for reference, here's my panel layout (no dock)

Bill_MI 2016-07-27 10:45:47 UTC #11

I also had to restart from a power failure but up to 1d 18h and RES is up 40%.

v3xx 2016-07-29 01:03:51 UTC #12

Two days now and nothing to report.

Bill_MI 2016-07-29 10:43:55 UTC #13

I'm shy of 4 days and it's definitely heading upwards but not at anything alarming. It bounced up and down a tiny bit along the way.

32.2M START (RES = 32208)
53.6M 3 days 18:21 (RES = 53584)

ouroumov 2016-07-29 21:59:18 UTC #14

Day 6 after the reboot and I think this is happening again:

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.

ouroumov 2016-07-31 17:23:12 UTC #15

OK so, pardon my poor chart-making skills...
Left scale is memory, right scale is CPU.

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:

ouroumov 2016-08-01 16:42:24 UTC #16

Filed two separate bug reports:

against mate-panel : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate/+bug/1608599 (with steps to reproduce)
against eom : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate/+bug/1608603

Why you use Linux (has Ubuntu mate in it.)

ouroumov 2016-08-08 14:53:46 UTC #17

So guys, was anyone able to reproduce?

Bill_MI 2016-08-08 22:48:45 UTC #18

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.

rbeltz48 2016-08-16 16:07:04 UTC #19

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?

mrtribute 2016-08-16 17:25:52 UTC #20

I don't know why your memory usage is so high.

I have UM 14.04 and UM 16.04 on the same machine. I get the following results (same start-up applications):

UM 14.04 64-bit uses 344 MiB
UM 16.04 64-bit uses 542 MiB

ouroumov 2016-09-12 08:53:02 UTC #21

Reproduced in Fedora 24 with MATE 1.14.1
Reported upstream @ https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/479

Hicks20 2017-01-03 11:36:19 UTC #22

I have the same problem on Debian 8 with mate desktop. mate-panel eats tons of memory and cpu till crash my pc.

ouroumov 2017-01-03 13:49:58 UTC #23

So for those of you that haven't followed the conversation on github: it turns out the leak came from GTK+, not mate-panel directly. The code has been patched upstream to mitigate this issue but the changes have yet to reach the LTS, they must first undergo the SRU process.

Wimpy 2017-01-15 09:02:29 UTC #24

And I'm going to try and progress that SRU process.

ouroumov 2017-08-12 17:09:20 UTC #25

Alright.

Thanks to @Wimpy, @tsimonq2 and the guy who developed the GTK patches, I had the pleasure to see this in the updates today:

This issue is now fixed in Xenial \o/

tsimonq2 2017-08-12 17:21:52 UTC #26

\o/

Thanks for the ping.