Something the update-manager installed has a huge memory leak

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 17 April 2013 15:45:01 Nils Kassube did opine:

> Gene Heskett wrote:
> > I rebooted late yesterday & didn't do anything worse than a little
> > solitaire after that, went to bed.  By the time I get up, the machine
> > is extremely unresponsive with the update-managers screen sitting on
> > top of kmail.  No response to clicking on any buttons.  Click on the
> > workspace where I keep a terminal running, and start htop.  In 7
> > hours of uptime I am 469 megs into swap!
> > 
> > Back to the kmail workspace, click on the install button quite a few
> > times, and it finally wakes up and does this mornings updates.  Then
> > I reboot. And I haven't started about 5 more 'tails' I usually have
> > running, but on a machine with 4Gb of dram, at 1h:36m into this new
> > reboot, I am already 1 megabyte into swap, something that normally
> > takes 3 or 4 days.
> > 
> > Anybody have any clues as to what the update-manager has installed on
> > 10.04-4 LTS in the last 2-3 days that has a huge leak?
> 
> While I have no idea what update was installed lately on your machine, I
> would suggest to disable swap. Unless you want to hibernate the machine,
> it shouldn't be really necessary with 4GB of RAM. Furthermore you could
> try to find out which application is using all your RAM. I'm not sure,
> but something like
> 
> htop -s PERCENT_MEM
> 
> could be a start to find the culprit. My guess would be flash.
> 
> > Full powerdown reboot, coming right up, but this is to get rid of
> > virtuoso- t, whatever the hell that is.
> 
> IIRC, virtuoso-t is the database for nepomuk, i.e. desktop search.
> 
> 
> Nils

Well, at the instant I looked with htop, there were 3 or 4 instances of it 
running, using (probably all in the same buffer) about 1.5Gb of virtual ram 
each.  Sorry, but you can't put enough lipstick on that to make it 
kissable.  Not to mention I was getting, and haven't noticed any since 
restarting without it, desktop freezes of over a minutes duration, with zip 
use showing on any core by gkrellm but its display march wasn't marching.  
And while I could switch workspaces to see what htop said, its display was 
frozen.  Eventually it would get a word in edgewise and the uptime display 
would jump a minute or more.  ATM, clamscan is doing its 2x a day thing, 
and the desktop is 100% responsive.

If virtuoso-t is indeed the culprit, it needs to be taught to play nice.  I 
have one other app, a .jar that isn't visible to the outside world, that I 
haven't restarted since this boot, so not everything is knocked out of the 
usual culprits list by this boot.

I know that once booted, I can as root do a swapoff -a, but How does one 
disable swap, I have 3 drives with 4Gb of swap on each and it finds and 
uses all 12Gb of if I'd let it.

Cheers, Gene
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