After my weekend system reboot, my FF came up with Boomtango re-enabled. I had disabled that when I had 2GB because it appeared to be a memory hog. Now that I have 8GB I thought I would try it again. Unfortunately, my history is huge, and Boomtango can take up to two minutes to do a simple history refresh, even with 6GB free. It's 100% CPU bound on one core. During this two minute period, the Compiz "window fade" event occurred several times. Now that I know what this is, I immediately disabled "fading windows" effect in Compiz config.
The window fading effect was often triggered by my extreme memory leak, so I had associated the two events. Turns out Compiz has a separate bug: other aspects of my desktop also fade (tool-tip backgrounds, the background for my Tilda terminal) and sometimes after the fade event, they end up *stuck* in the faded state. Right now all my window title bars are rendering black on black, my tilda terminal is rendering black on black, all my taskbar tool-tips are black on black, other application tool tips are black on black, and the Evolution new mail notification is also black on black. This is across all nine desktops. The Evolution mail notification was interesting because I was just barely able to make out the black text on top of the black background. It was like reading tar on blacktop during a total eclipse, but it was there. While tracking this down, a strange coincidence. A thread explaining how to disable window fade is blaming a huge memory leak under Ubuntu on Evolution/Gnome Do, both of which I have installed. Evolution is running, Gnome Do isn't. My memory problems began around the time I installed Gnome Do. I've also run Evolution far more often during that period. They seem to share some underlying infrastructure. http://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/cj2a9/why_do_windows_dim/c0sxdr4 I would dump Evolution in a heartbeat, but during my brief trial with Thunderbird it ate my remote IMAP folder, so it's not an option for fetching mail on my primary ISP. Don't have time to further explore this, but there's a good chance this is the smoking gun. -- severe memory leak began in Karmic, persisting in Lucid https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/590566 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
