massive memory leak ?

Submitted by gaudyo on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 05:02
Forums: 
Soulseek General Discussion

Hi there. Just installed this lovely client on my Xubuntu this morning
Works nicely , with the exception of memory footprint :
ie you start at 40-50 MB used, but after some minutes, and especially if you use search, it inflates to insane proportions...
after 1hour, I had to close it, it ate 1GB alone, while I just had dlded something like 3 albums and had 3 in queue from 2 different users, nothing extreme. On the other hand, I made many searches, and while I close them after some time, it seems the memory used for each searcb is not freed, leading to rather extreme memory consumption :)

system : Xubuntu 13.04 64 bits
client : SoulseekQt-2013-5-18-64bit

thescarletfire's picture

Submitted by thescarletfire on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 08:34.

Hi there,

I've used that build on my Ubuntu and Xubuntu boxes and haven't encountered that much of a memory spike before. I have had similar happen on Windows before but never on Linux.

How many files are you sharing? What's your RAM also?

Usually when search tabs are closed the memory is freed up.

Submitted by gaudyo on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 21:05.

.I have 2GB here.
. 11745 files / 22 GB shared for now, nothing extreme...
.if you need a quick shortcut to fill your memory, just type "2013" in search ;) , wait a few minutes, open task manager to monitor program RAM usage, close the search, see if it frees something. definitely not the case here, not a single MB, the only way out for memory is to quit the program...
of course I make more standard/narrowed down searches than "2013", but pile enough standard searches and the problem is the same, it quickly becomes annoying...

thescarletfire's picture

Submitted by thescarletfire on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 21:24.

2GB of RAM is fairly low these days, especially w/ Qt (in my experience). If you search a lot or share a lot, then yes your RAM will get sucked up fast.

Are you able to upgrade your RAM? Memory is quite cheap these days.

Submitted by gaudyo on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 22:08.

I guess I could but that's hardly the point, which is this last linux build doesn't free a single MB when we close search(es). so yeah it piles up ram to absurd values when it clearly shouldn't.
Maybe I'll try older builds to see if it's as huge...

thescarletfire's picture

Submitted by thescarletfire on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 22:10.

Following your details and searching configuration, I cannot reproduce that Linux memory leak to the degree you're seeing - sorry.

Submitted by gaudyo on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 22:10.

and do you see memory freed when you close search at the very least ? or not ?

thescarletfire's picture

Submitted by thescarletfire on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 23:24.

If you can't get the Qt client to work no matter what you try, perhaps you could try Nicotine+?
It's a different design and approach to Soulseek, and it's not for everyone.
But it is very low on resources, maybe you could benefit from that?

See the image below to see what RAM usage is when I do the "2013" search for 10 minutes straight:
(it's not even 100MB total)

http://i7.minus.com/ibi67HrznooDnZ.jpg
(this is on my Ubuntu machine fyi)

Just trying to help.

thescarletfire's picture

Submitted by thescarletfire on Wed, 07/17/2013 - 23:07.

Well, I did notice that if you search for "2013" it does chew up a lot of RAM (almost to 700MB from a system-idle 500MB RAM), but perhaps when Nir ports the new ScarletFire build into Linux, that will be addressed? 200MB RAM spike imo is not "huge", compared to what I was seeing in Windows pre-ScarletFire build.

When I closed the 2013 search, RAM did not recover, however it did recover after more real-world searches that didn't return huge results (i.e. I'd never search for something that I knew would have 15 million results, for example).

But yes, I could reproduce the RAM spike using a super-generic search term - but I'm hoping the new port for Linux will fix that along with all its other perks.

Submitted by cognoscosmos on Sun, 08/04/2013 - 05:54.

Hello, yes I'd like to add that I've experienced progressive memory leak using both the Scarletfire and previous QT builds, after about an hour its usage has gone up to something like 700MB and doesn't seem to be stopping. If I leave it running overnight the machine (laptop with 1GB RAM) has basically gound to a halt and I have to perform a hard reset. I thought it might be the search tabs using the memory but same happened when I closed the search tabs.

However no such problems with the NS version, have reverted to that ...