Public bug reported:
Yesterday when moving relatively huge amounts of data between hard
drives on my system (using the GUI - drag-and-drop) I discovered that
after some time I had consumed all available memory and all available
swap.
System:
Athlon 64 X2 processor on ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe MoBo.
4 gig RAM
1.64 gigs Swap
Ubuntu 10.04 (64 bit) "Desktop" edition.
System configuration:
40 gig IDE mounted as root ( / )
4x 1T SATA mounted as md0 - RAID 5 on /mnt/Storage3/Public
1x 2T eSATA mouonted on /mnt/Storage3/Public2
1x 2T eSATA mounted on /mnt/Backup
1x 2T eSATA mounted on /mnt/Backup2
Sustem is being used as a NAS file server running Samba, Apache, and
SWAT
System is fully up-to-date according to Update Manager, with all updates
to whatever it wanted to update, kernel, firefox, and a whole laundry-
list of other things. . . .
Running "gadgets":
1. HW-monitor running libsensors (monitoring CPU temp, both core temps, CPU
and chassis fan speeds, and four voltages - vCore, 3.3v supply, 5v supply and
12v supply)
2. "Weather" gadget.
Desktop configuration:
Running the "Clear" (?) Desktop theme (the "Windows" looking desktop)
I have not tried this using any other desktop configuration.
Possibly relevant?
During a moment of absolutely culpable stupidity, I inadvertantly deleted all
the non-dot folders and files from my home directory. Not knowing any clever
way to rebuild my home directory, I rebooted into the 10.04 live CD (64 bit),
and copied the "Ubuntu" users home directory (the non-dot folders) back to my
home directory, changed permissions and owner to match my user, and rebooted.
Prior to this copy, I verified that none of the hidden (dot) files or folders
had ben touched. I do not believe that this would have any bearing on this,
but I mention it just in case.
Scenerio:
My 4T RAID-5 file store was becoming fuller than I could back-up so I
decided to re-distribute the files by moving certain directories to
Public2 (an additional drive I just added) and replacing them (on
Public) with symlinks.
The magnitude of the move was in the order of almost two teryabytes of
data, (appx. 1.5-or-so T), to distribute the data more evenly between
the two drives.
About half the data was moved using "cp" on the command line. Parts of
the data that had non-standard filenames (containing spaces, etc.)
caused difficulties moving it with cp, so I used the "file browser" as
root (gksu "nautilus. . .") because some of the directories had varying
permissions set.
The porocess was as follows:
1. Drag directory from source to destination.
2. Wait for the copy to successfully finish.
3. Delete the original direcotry.
4. Create a symlink (drag with ctl-shift) from the new location back to the
original location.
This was done because only the Public directory is shared via Samba, and I
wanted to keep it that way.
In some cases, I moved multiple directories at the same time - some
being very small (in the megabytes range) and some were relatively large
(in the multiples of gigabytes range)
This went on for several hours.
Eventually my system virtually ground to a halt. Attempting to launch
any new GUI based process failed with "unable to fork - could not
allocate memory" (or something like that).
I eventually got "top" running in a terminal, and discovered that all
available RAM and all available swap had been consumed.
I was eventually able to get the computer to shutdown, pause to catch
it's breath, and restart.
Performing some directory copies after the re-boot, with "system
monitor" running on the desktop, disclosed the following:
1. Under normal operating condiditons, the system is using appx. 450
(plus or minus) megs of RAM and zero swap.
2. Copying of any amount of data using the command-line within a terminal does
not affect the system memory used.
There are variations in memory used - but the magnitudes are less than about 50
or so megs - it never gets as high as 500 megs used. Once the process is
finished, the memory used returns to very nearly the base value - eventually
dropping back to it after a moment or two.
(Update: This actually depends on the amount of data being moved, and
the amount of terminal activity - I have subsequently seeen it rise into
the 600+megs region, but it always recovers.)
3. If I copy data using the GUI and drag and drop between different
file-manager windows - the used memory rises to about 570 (plus or
minus) megs used, and when the process finishes, it releases only about
20 or 30 megs - if that much. Additional directory moves cause the
memory usage to continue to climb by about 100 megs per copy. Note that
the majority of the copies were multi-gigabyte copies that could take
from 10 minutes to an hour to complete.
Rebooting the machine always restores memory - as we would expect.
Top shows Nautilus consuming increasing amounts of memory every copy.
I looked all over the web checking for a solution, and I even tried the
"apt-get remove appmenu-gtk" fix - apt-get reported that I didn't have
the package installed.
I used system monitor to look at running processes, and nothing looked
fishy to me. (i.e. I didn't have 30 instances of nautilus running, or
other strange things like that.)
I did not try logging off and back on again.
Due to the somewhat "mission critical" nature of this file-store, my
ability to experiment with it to try various things may be severely
limited.
Any assistance would be gratefuly appreciated.
Jim
Follow-up information as requested:
@ actionparsnip
uname -a:
Linux Storage3 2.6.32-29-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 11 20:52:10 UTC 2011
x86_64 GNU/Linux
lsb_release -a:
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS
Release: 10.04
Codename: lucid
echo:
(returned no data)
apt-cache policy nautilus:
nautilus:
Installed: 1:2.30.1-0ubuntu1.1
Candidate: 1:2.30.1-0ubuntu1.1
Version table:
*** 1:2.30.1-0ubuntu1.1 0
500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates/main Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
1:2.30.0-0ubuntu4 0
500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages
** Affects: nautilus (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/734552
Title:
Memory leak in Nautilus?
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