Xfce Forum

bayindirh

Member

Registered: 2017-09-25

Posts: 13

Possible memory leak with monitor connect & disconnect.

Hello,

Note: I've searched for relevant bug/forum message but, I was unable to find it.

I'm having a nasty case of a memory leak during long sessions with my XFCE4 desktop. I'm driving a DP monitor over an nVidia GT730, and leaving my computer on for a long time (~100 days). When I leave office at night, I turn off my monitor, and turn it on in the mornings. After a certain time xfdesktop process' memory footprint exceeds 700MB mark. I logout and login to fix the problem.

Sometimes system fails to logout and just hangs however I'm not sure whether the reason is XFCE4 or the nVidia drivers, so I didn't pursue the matter further.

I'm planning to plot memory usage of the xfdesktop process and post the results here in the coming days.

Just wanted to ask the best course of action before opening a bug report. Any suggestions and help is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Hakan

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: Possible memory leak with monitor connect & disconnect.

Didn't find anything meaty either, but in this thread a user restarts xfdesktop in debug mode by opening a terminal and issuing this command:

xfdesktop -Q && xfdesktop --enable-debug

So maybe that's a good starting point...

bayindirh

Member

Registered: 2017-09-25

Posts: 13

Re: Possible memory leak with monitor connect & disconnect.

Hi alcornoqui,

Thanks a lot, I'll take a look into it.

Cheers.

Last edited by bayindirh (2019-12-17 10:57:28)

bayindirh

Member

Registered: 2017-09-25

Posts: 13

Re: Possible memory leak with monitor connect & disconnect.

Hello again,

First results are in from the profiling. It looks like turning the monitor off and on indeed leaks some memory in xfdesktop process.

Monitor is turned off:

PID         DATE      TIME      ELAPSED    CPU    MEM       RSS     VSIZE       CMD
1282   2019-12-20  17:19:09     07:03:10    0.0    0.4     66512    471148  xfdesktop
1282   2019-12-20  17:34:09     07:18:10    0.0    0.7    117536    521952  xfdesktop

Monitor is turned on:

PID         DATE      TIME      ELAPSED    CPU    MEM       RSS     VSIZE       CMD
1282   2019-12-23  08:34:32   2-22:18:33    0.0    0.7    118952    524120  xfdesktop
1282   2019-12-23  08:49:32   2-22:33:33    0.0    0.8    132872    537740  xfdesktop

Will get some more data and report the bug with more details later this week.

bayindirh

Member

Registered: 2017-09-25

Posts: 13

Re: Possible memory leak with monitor connect & disconnect.

I've traced the memory usage over 10 days and, a pattern emerged about the memory usage, so I reported the problem. Details and the actual bug report can be found in bugzilla.

jonas

Member

Registered: 2020-04-08

Posts: 2

Website

Re: Possible memory leak with monitor connect & disconnect.

I've been using XFCE for many years and have never seen this issue before now. But I've been working from home lately because of the corona virus. So I have a KVM switch that I use to switch from my home desktop to my work laptop, lately I've seen issues with xfdesktop growing to 2.5GB and more. I have to reboot often now to free memory.
I notice that the memory increases if I switch to my work laptop and back with around 125MB each time.

bayindirh

Member

Registered: 2017-09-25

Posts: 13

Re: Possible memory leak with monitor connect & disconnect.

I've been using XFCE for many years and have never seen this issue before now. But I've been working from home lately because of the corona virus. So I have a KVM switch that I use to switch from my home desktop to my work laptop, lately I've seen issues with xfdesktop growing to 2.5GB and more. I have to reboot often now to free memory.
I notice that the memory increases if I switch to my work laptop and back with around 125MB each time.

Hi Jonas, can you please add this comment to the bugzilla? The bug has been possibly fixed and, I was gonna test it but, due to COVID-19, we're working from home... The problematic machine was my office workstation unfortunately.

jonas

Member

Registered: 2020-04-08

Posts: 2

Website

Re: Possible memory leak with monitor connect & disconnect.

I will. I have applied the patch now. Looks like the memory increased the first times I switch, but stopped on 99MB now. I will do some more testing for a while before I conclude.
If anyone is using openSUSE it's built here: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show … /xfdesktop