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)
I also had to restart from a power failure but up to 1d 18h and RES is up 40%.
Two days now and nothing to report.
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)
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.
1 Like
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:
2 Likes
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
4 Likes
So guys, was anyone able to reproduce?
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?
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
Reproduced in Fedora 24 with MATE 1.14.1
Reported upstream @ https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/479
1 Like
I have the same problem on Debian 8 with mate desktop. mate-panel eats tons of memory and cpu till crash my pc.
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.
1 Like
And I’m going to try and progress that SRU process.
3 Likes
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/
5 Likes
\o/
Thanks for the ping. 
4 Likes
I had memory leak problems using Ubuntu Mate 18.04.1 after installing it yesterday. What worked for me is stopping firejail and firetools and the memory leak stopped. So, if you’re using firejail, then it might be the cause of memory leaks. I think this is a problem with the Bionic Beaver rather than firejail. I find firejail to be a great piece of software but it causes a lot of problems with 18.04.1.
Hi, do any of these tools display an icon in the notification tray? How did you determine it was a memory leak?
I noticed using psensor; I used psensor’s ability to warn me when memory falls after a certain low threshold. However, after using Bionic Beaver after a couple of hours without Firejail, it seems that it is not a problem with the OS, but with Firejail needing more than 8gb of RAM, which is the amount I have. I thought that it is a problem with the Bionic Beaver after reading about a lot of people having problems with memory leaks after installing the 18.04 version. Bionic Beaver works great with 8 gb of RAM; if someone has memory leaks with Bionic Beaver, I recommend:
- Upgrading the hardware to a minimum of 8 gb of RAM
- Not using Firejail beyond 16gb of RAM
Not only Ubuntu 18.04, but also web browsers need a lot of RAM these days, so upgrading the RAM seems necessary to me.
I wrote this in case someone else has the same problem. So, I hope this helps.
Cheers.