Kicker RAM usage

[linisgre]

Hi,

I am using KDE 3.5.5 on Gentoo amd64 (C2D E6600 2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM). I notice that the kicker process is using an increasing amount of memory the longer I have it running. This is not new to 3.5.5, I had the same issues with e.g. 3.5.4

On kicker, I have the following applets:
- lock/logout button
- this calculator thingie
- kweather
- sound volume
- kbandwidth
- clock

Akregator, amarok, pidgin, skype and vmware have added their icons there as well.

After a fresh start of kicker, it uses about 22 MB of RAM (1), but after it has run for 7 days, the RAM usage is up to almost half a gigabyte (2). While I do have 4GB of RAM available, it does affect my system performance (I do have other, much bigger apps running). I usually resort to killing the kicker process after a few days to get my RAM back.

Does anybody know whether this is a bug of kicker itself, or of one of the applets, or whether and how I could prevent this from happening?


(1)
> cat /proc/14072/status
Name: kicker
State: S (sleeping)
SleepAVG: 98%
Tgid: 14072
Pid: 14072
PPid: 1
TracerPid: 0
Uid: 1000 1000 1000 1000
Gid: 100 100 100 100
FDSize: 64
Groups: 10 18 27 35 100 412
VmPeak: 109692 kB
VmSize: 109684 kB
VmLck: 0 kB
VmHWM: 21868 kB
VmRSS: 21820 kB
VmData: 3456 kB
VmStk: 84 kB
VmExe: 4 kB
VmLib: 35116 kB
VmPTE: 224 kB

(2)
> cat /proc/7436/status
Name: kicker
State: S (sleeping)
SleepAVG: 98%
Tgid: 7436
Pid: 7436
PPid: 1
TracerPid: 0
Uid: 1000 1000 1000 1000
Gid: 100 100 100 100
FDSize: 64
Groups: 10 18 27 35 100 412
VmPeak: 597796 kB
VmSize: 597792 kB
VmLck: 0 kB
VmHWM: 504860 kB
VmRSS: 504856 kB
VmData: 490072 kB
VmStk: 84 kB
VmExe: 48 kB
VmLib: 35128 kB
VmPTE: 1180 kB
Threads: 1
SigQ: 0/49152

[xalan]

It seems kicker is leaking memory. You can do a reduction test. Start with a simple kicker with minimal applets and see if after a couple of hours the amount of memory consumed has increased. If not then keep adding a new applet to it. Since my box I never saw any probs with kicker, I suspect the problem with one of the applets.

If you are adventurous then use valgrind to start kicker process

[linisgre]

I've tried the add-one-at-a-time approach and it seems to be that kbandwidth is leaking memory (roughly 3 MB/hour). As it seems to have not been updated since 2005, I probably gonna drop it.