Re: Memory leaks with gnome-terminal?

[Ross Burton <ross burtonini com>]

On Fri, 2002-05-03 at 15:55, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Ross Burton <ross burtonini com> writes: 
> > I have just checked out libzvt from CVS, applied the patch and rebuild. 
> > Unless gnome-terminal statically links to libzvt I'm sad to say that
> > this didn't fix the problem for me.  Within minutes (after creating 10
> > terminals and closing them):
> 
> Be careful - if you don't use --disable-factory, you may be running
> the old gnome-terminal process, not the new one.

I was carefull -- I restarted X before testing.  The X server before I
installed the fixed patch was hitting onto 300M, and making a noticable
dent in my swap.

> A caveat here, you have to take what "top" and "ps" say with a huge
> grain of salt, especially what they say about the X server... it can
> be hard to know if you have a real memory leak or just caching
> behavior of some kind. Of course using huge amounts of RAM increasing
> over a long period of time is probably a leak, but checking top
> immediately before/during/after running an app doesn't always mean
> that much.

I've been running for several hours with a solid background on my
terminals. I noticed that my swap was not touched during that time.  To
check I have just created and closed 20 gnome-terminals, and the total
memory increase in X was ~30K.

I then changed to shaded transparent backgrounds and repeated the test. 
I now have a 100M X server and half of my swap is used instead of none.

I am willing to believe it could be caching but if it is the algorithm
needs work... it is eating far too much memory.  As I said, every few
days I had to logout/login again as my machine was slowing down too much
-- it was like using Windows 98 again. :)

Regards,
Ross Burton
-- 
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross burtonini com
                                       jabber: rossburton jabber org
                        diary: http://advogato.org/person/RossBurton
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