Bug#593849: gconf2: gconftool-2 uses up all my ram during package upgrades

[Andres Salomon]

Package: gconf2
Version: 2.28.1-3
Severity: normal

During upgrades of various packages in squeeze, gconftool-2 gets called
from maintainer scripts.  During these calls, gconftool-2 uses an
amazing amount of memory; over 100MB.  When doing this on an XO-1 (which
has 256MB of physical RAM), it ends up triggering the OOM killer if X
and gnome are running.

To give you some idea, here's my XO with full gnome running (using
xmonad instead of metacity, but otherwise w/ everything else..
nautilus, g-panel, weather-applet, network-manager, hal, etc), a
few gnome-terminals, and claws-mail running:

             total      used       free     shared    buffers cached
Mem:         197580     176600     20980      0        180    95372
-/+ buffers/cache:      81048      116532

One would think that 116MB would be plenty for a dist-upgrade to
happen, but no; gconftool-2 triggers the OOM killer.  If I shut down
X/gdm, that provides *just* enough to do the upgrade.  It doesn't
matter how many packages I'm upgrading; upgrading a single package that
makes use of gconf will cause OOM.

Watching gconftool-2 in top during the dist-upgrade shows it using
at least 100MB before completion..