Memory leak on Gutsy

[Laura Conrad]

I upgraded my laptop from Feisty to Gutsy about a month ago.  This
machine is used mainly for web browsing and video playing, so I didn't
mind testing an unreleased distribution, and if the answer to the
problem is to reinstall from scratch, it isn't a big deal.

At first it seemed that Gutsy was working fine, but then I noticed
that while under Feisty I could leave the machine booted for weeks at
a time, under Gutsy, the performance would deteriorate after a day or
two and I would have to reboot.  

"top" says that the culprit that is taking up more memory on the
second day than the first is "udevd":

top - 12:55:23 up 17:07,  4 users,  load average: 2.62, 2.47, 2.39
Tasks: 112 total,   6 running, 106 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 88.7%us,  4.0%sy,  1.0%ni,  0.0%id,  5.5%wa,  0.5%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    766600k total,   759104k used,     7496k free,     1112k buffers
Swap:   642560k total,   184660k used,   457900k free,    47304k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 2546 root      21  -4  185m 184m  412 R 89.9 24.6 821:00.60 udevd              
30671 lconrad   15   0  329m 157m  23m S  7.8 21.1  79:16.92 firefox-bin        
31874 lconrad   15   0 72744  20m   9m R  2.0  2.8   7:16.93 /usr/bin/gnome-    
    1 root      15   0  2952  536  484 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.36 init               

This is after running for less than a day, and with no particular load:

lconrad at recorder:~$ uptime
 12:56:05 up 17:07,  4 users,  load average: 2.49, 2.46, 2.38

I am not able to just restart udev:

lconrad at recorder:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart
[sudo] password for lconrad:
 * Loading additional hardware drivers...                                [fail] 
lconrad at recorder:~$ 

And the same udevd process is still running and hogging the memory and
CPU.

There is also another problem that didn't happen under Feisty; I
mention it only on the assumption that it might be related.  Something
is not happy with the state of the device table; dmesg has lots of:

[61926.664000] device-mapper: table: 254:2: linear: dm-linear: Device lookup failed
[61926.664000] device-mapper: ioctl: error adding target to table

Since I've heard about lots of people being really happy with their
upgrade to Gutsy, I'm sure this is something wierd with my system, but
I'm reluctant to upgrade my desktop/server machine while the "test"
machine is in such an undesirable state.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

-- 
Laura (mailto:lconrad at laymusic.org , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097	fax: (501) 641-5011
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139