Re: Leaking at-spi-registryd

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

OK, I spoke too soon.

My system is snappier sans shredder, but I'm still seeing the leaks.
This morning after running overnight, at-spi-registryd showed 27% memory
use according to ps auxw. By way of comparison, firefox only showed 13%.
Seems rather suspicious that at-spi-registryd would need twice the
memory.

This morning I copied the old /usr/lib/at-spi/at-spi-registryd to a
backup and linked it to the copy in /usr/local/libexec, so in theory I'm
now running the latest from subversion. I've also confirmed that this
version is linking against locally-installed libraries.

After one page load of a long page, I saw at-spi-registryd memory use
spike from 0.6% to 3.9%. I'm watching it steadily increase despite not
doing much with the system, just having an IM conversation and checking
ps. I'm noticing that my system has become slightly more sluggish--not
annoyingly so, but things aren't happening as instantly as they once
did, and if the pattern holds, I only have a few more hours or a day of
reliable use left. Before I typed this email, it had spiked from 3.9% to
a bit over 6 in a manner of minutes, this after remaining below 1% for
hours.

I don't know what I might have changed to cause this, other than
following standard Ubuntu updates and Orca from trunk. So, questions:

Is ps auxw a reliable metric? Is the percentage of memory used a
reliable indicator?

Is there any way to provide more debugging info, other than to continue
saying "this isn't working, help!!!"? :)

Does anyone else see this behavior? How much memory does an
at-spi-registryd process typically require? I am on crappy hardware, so
it could be that my 512 megs of RAM isn't enough to begin with, but I
can't understand how that would lead to this process slowly consuming
more and more memory until it has twice that of firefox.



On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 11:48 +0800, Li Yuan wrote:
> Hi Nolan,
> 
> I didn't notice serious leak in at-spi-registryd. I will take a look at 
> it these days.
> 
> Nolan Darilek wrote:
> >
> >
> > I tried checking out the latest at-spi-registryd from subversion. I 
> > use stow to keep all locally-installed stuff separate and removable 
> > from distribution-installed packages. I have 
> > /usr/local/libexec/at-spi/at-spi-registryd, but 
> > /usr/lib/at-spi/at-spi-registryd is still being started. How can I 
> > start my own locally installed at-spi-registryd without replacing the 
> > Ubuntu packaged version?
> You need to build gnome-session to start the right at-spi-registryd. But 
> this is harder than just replace the system at-spi-registryd.
> >
> > Until I figure this out, is there some way of stopping/restarting 
> > at-spi-registryd mid-session? I tried killing it, but after that point 
> > I was unable to get to a prompt where I could start a new instance. 
> > Generally I can tell that I'm at a terminal or in the run dialog 
> > because backspace on an empty line emits a beep, but nothing I did 
> > brought me to this point.
> After you kill at-spi-registryd, the GUI event can not be passed to ATs, 
> so it shouldn't be killed mid-session.
> 
> Regards,
> Li