[mythtv-users] mythfrontend consuming/leaking memory just sitting at the main menu

[Ronald Frazier]

I've been having a problem for a while now with my backend system
locking up on me (total lockup...no terminal access and even pressing
caps lock doesn't toggle the light on the keyboard), about once a week
on average. After thinking it was a hardware problem for quite a
while, I was finally on the system the other day while it melted down,
and I was able to stay on just long enough to see kswapd0 at 99% in
iotop. Then it kicked me out before I could figure anything else out.

So for the last few days, I've been doing some logging of memory
usage. I noticed my available swap file shrinking by about 1GB per
day. So yesterday I took a quick look at various processes and I
noticed mythfrontend was quit big. In top, it showed mythfrontend with
a virtual size of about 2GB, resident of about 500MB, and a swap size
of 1.7GB. I knew that the day before, the resident size was only about
300MB. The other 2 seemed really big now, but I didn't recall what
they were the day before. I setup a few scripts to gather and log some
memory and swap info from /proc for the mythfrontend process.

This morning, I see that my available swap has dropped another 900MB,
and top is reporting mythfrontend is 3GB virtaul, 800MB resident,
2.5GB swap. Looking at my info from /proc, I'm also seeing
mythfrontend continuing to grow in size in various metrics

So what I have here is mythfrontend growing in size at a rate of close
to 1GB per day. The thing is, mythfrontend is doing nothing more than
sitting at the main menu. I've got 2 dedicated frontends that I use
regularly. The backend system only rarely gets used as a frontend. I
have mythfrontend run automatically on bootup and just leave it sit at
the main menu so it's ready to go on the occasion that my wife wants
to use it when she's downstairs.

I'm running 0.25-fixes from about a month ago. Has anyone else noticed
anything similar on their systems? I didn't notice it on my frontends,
but those typically get rebooted each day so they wouldn't have enough
time to grow in size enough for me to notice.

---
Ron Frazier