[gst-devel] matroskamux memory use question

[Ron McOuat]

I am new to gstreamer but not to Linux/UNIX of other types.

I don't want to file a bug report if this is expected behavior, however, 
if this should be reported I will be happy to follow up.

I am using Fedora 9 and have built with the latest stable gstreamer plus 
base and good plugins source downloads in order to test with valgrind.

Using matroskamux from gst-plugins-good-0.10.10, also the Fedora 
released versions which are older have the same behavior, I noticed the 
process size increasing as buffers pass though. To make this easy to 
reproduce I used this simple pipeline.

gst-launch fakesrc num-buffers=100000 ! matroskamux ! fakesink

Process starts at ~ 700k and increases to 3.1 MBytes

Repeat the same line with 200,000 buffers and the final size is 5.4 MBytes

So that is about 2.3 MBytes / 100,000 buffers through matroskamux or 
about 23 or maybe 24 bytes per buffer.

If the pipeline does not contain matroskamux then the process size does 
not increase, tested to 1,000,000 buffers.

With the latest stable source I compiled and used the gst-uninstall 
script to launch a shell and use the local libraries under my account. 
 From there I ran valgrind with memtest using detailed reporting against 
the above pipeline and nothing is reported as a leak. The gst-launch 
spends a considerable amount of time at final size until the pipeline 
shutdown messages occur. I figure the final shut down of the pipeline is 
actually cleaning up this memory.

My question is should this element actually behave this way? Once a 
buffer is passed through a filter there should be no held reference. I 
have suspicions about the gst_buffer_new_and_alloc in function 
gst_matroska_mux_create_buffer_header() is not getting unreferenced 
until the program ends but I don't know this code well enough yet. It 
could also be something held in the matroska libraries?

Thanks

Ron