[orca-list] Leaky at-spi-registryd

["Nolan Darilek" <nolan thewordnerd info>]

This is a bit off-topic on this list, but I didn't really get any help 
on gnome-accessibility-list, and I'm wondering if there are more end 
users on this list who might be able to chime in.

I'm having huge problems with my Intrepid system. If I don't reboot my 
box once per day, it's only because I've been out of town and have left 
it on unattended. Slowly, one or more programs consume a ton of memory 
and hit swap, and before I know it, switching between windows takes a 
minute or more, opening up new apps takes forever. This isn't under what 
I feel to be a heavy load--firefox, pidgin, thunderbird and 
gnome-terminal. Killing and restarting the individual programs doesn't help.

Eventually I fired up gnome-system-monitor, sorted programs by memory 
use and noticed at-spi-registryd using nearly 300m on its own. Since 
noticing this, I've kept an eye on at-spi-registryd use during each run, 
and when my system performance dips, the memory use reported by ps of 
at-spi-registryd is steadily climbing. It hangs around at less than 1% 
for a while, then shoots through the roof.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to restart at-spi-registryd 
mid-session. I also haven't been given any tips for just how to debug 
this, and the only remedy I have is to restart my session or the box 
entirely.

I've filed a bug report, critical, because that was the level the bug 
form specified for leaks. I rebuilt at-spi with -g and ran it under 
valgrind. All this showed was that yes, there were leaks, though only a 
few thousand bytes, but that at-spi-registryd was using hundreds of megs 
of memory on termination.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? AFAIK I'm just running stock 
Intrepid with trunk Orca, unless some other binary has contaminated my 
system, but I'm pretty good about installing custom stuff in quarantine. 
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to debug this? I've tried different 
versions of Firefox from 3.0-3.2, not running Thunderbird and switching 
to Evolution. Nothing seems to help. I acknowledge that my system is 
older and only has 512M of RAM, but I've watched it go from performing 
well to hitting swap like mad in the span of an hour with no new apps 
launched, so I don't see how that is a factor. And well, I hate to be 
negative and I really do enjoy Linux, but I've had better performance 
under OS X and XP under similar light loads.

I'm sure I've got a strange Mercury retrograde-inspired system here, but 
there *has* to be some way to debug this. Or is anyone else even seeing 
it? I don't know when it started, if it's always been this way or if 
it's only recently gotten annoying enough to me that now I'm trying to 
figure it out. :)

Thanks a bunch for any help.