Bug#374914: gweather: using over 20MB of resident memory; possible memory leak?

[Loïc Minier]

        Hi,

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006, Calum Mackay wrote:
> I've had gweather running for less than 24 hours, and I see it's resident
> memory usage is at 20MB:
> UID        PID  PPID  C    SZ   RSS PSR STIME TTY          TIME CMD
> calum    12240     1  0 22546 23092   0 Jun21 ?        00:01:52 /usr/lib/gnome-a
> which seems insane. I'm only monitoring two weather stations.


 One station here:

bee% ps -Fp 23058 
UID        PID  PPID  C    SZ   RSS PSR STIME TTY          TIME CMD
lool     23058     1  0 13437 11512   0 Jun17 ?        00:00:20
/usr/lib/gnome-a

 This url provides some information on how to look at the RSS:
    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/1999-April/msg02337.html
 in short: it includes the weight of shared memory from e.g. shared
 libraries.

 gweather-applet-2 depends on 15 shared libraries, which in turn depend
 on other shared libraries, etc., which sum up to 71 libraries.


 You can get a better picture of memory *specific* to a process with
 other fields from ps output, but the easiest is to look at memory
 reported as free by errr free.  In my case, I saw the second gweather
 applet freeing 2368 kB of memory when I removed it.

 This is still a lot, and I don't think this memory is used by the
 weather applet itself, I think it's mostly destinated at the libraries
 it uses and which need some buffers to store application data.


 On a related subject, I've read about a patch floating around that
 permits sharing of the same process to run multiple applets (and
 effectively saving this memory time the number of applets).  I think
 Ubuntu uses it.

  Cheers,
-- 
Loïc Minier <lool at dooz.org>