[Bug 2083258] Re: [SRU] xdg-dbus-proxy memory leak

[Qwerty Chouskie]

I believe this also affects focal and jammy.  It would be good to see
the fix in at least jammy, since it has a very wide install base (both
Ubuntu itself, and downstream distros like Pop_OS!, which only has an
alpha based on noble).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2083258

Title:
  [SRU] xdg-dbus-proxy memory leak

Status in xdg-dbus-proxy package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in xdg-dbus-proxy source package in Noble:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  [ Impact ]

  All the usual issues of memory leaks for long running processes, up to
  and including system sluggishness and eventually crashes.

  [ Test Plan ]

  * Using an affected application, e.g. mission-center installed via flat-pak, leave application running for 24 hours and check memory usage
  * Enable proposed (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed)
  * sudo apt install -t noble-proposed xdg-dbus-proxy
  * sudo reboot
  * Run affected application for the same length of time (e.g. 24 hours), observe significantly lower memory usage

  [ Regression Potential ]

  Relatively low. The patch itself is minimal, and is now incorporated
  in an upstream (https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-dbus-proxy/pull/58),
  which is present in oracular. Please note only the first patch from
  that PR is included; the second patch is rather more involved, and
  it's not clear that we need it to resolve the issue.

  That said, xdg-dbus-proxy is used by plenty of applications, and it's
  very tricky to diagnose whether a memory leak is *actually* fixed,
  particularly when not all applications display it, the leak can take a
  long time to become particularly noticeable, or the leak is affected
  by differing patterns of usage. To guard against this, the test plan
  targets an application known to be affected, and requests a
  particularly long runtime to make the leak more obvious to detect.

  [ Original Description ]

  Reported via IRC and comments on mission-center's GitLab [1]: for
  users of flatpak installs, xdg-dbus-proxy is leaking memory (causing
  particular issues for long running processes).

  The root cause appears to be leaked GVariant references, ultimately
  fixed in 0.1.6 [2] now available in oracular. However, this still
  affects the release version on noble, and is likely suitable for SRU.
  Patch to be prepared...

  [1]: https://gitlab.com/mission-center-devs/mission-center/-/issues/61#note_1584564638
  [2]: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-dbus-proxy/issues/51#issuecomment-2020464257

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