Excessive memory consumption by lightdm-gtk-greeter (Intel graphics controller, 13.04)

[Marius Gedminas]

On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 12:00:17AM +1100, Jason Heeris wrote:
> I recently installed Ubuntu (server) 13.04 on a Mac Mini (2012 model). I
> have lightdm installed as the display manager, and use the GTK greeter.
> I've noticed that after about a day, all of my RAM and swap will be used
> up, and htop indicates that the culprit is lightdm-gtk-greeter.
> 
> Of course, it's very hard to get diagnostic information at this point
> because the system is unresponsive to anything except the REISUB method of
> rebooting. I'm not sure whether lightdm-gtk-greeter really is the problem,
> or whether it's the graphics driver or some other part of the system.

Suggestion: sudo apt-get install atop.

In addition to being a yet another fancy top clone, it installs a daemon
that periodically (every 10 minutes by default) writes a snapshot of the
system state (what processes are running, how much RAM each is using,
etc.) into /var/log/atop.log (a binary file) that you can play back at a
latter time.

So when your system dies and you reboot, you can open a terminal and run

  sudo atop -r /var/log/atop.log

then step through the snapshots forward and backward by hitting 't'.

One of the display modes (hit ? to see a help screen) shows you the
memory usage and memory growth of each process.  This can help you
identify the cause of your memory problems.

HTH,
Marius Gedminas
-- 
Hanlon's Razor:
        Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained
        by stupidity.
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