Huge memory leak sometime after starting a pipeline

[Chris Tapp]

My application uses gst_parse_launch to create a pipleline of the form:

   playbin av-offset=-50000000 buffer-size=0 buffer-duration=0 name="name" uri=http://dvb:4242/bysid/4352 audio-sink="alsasink" video-sink="videoconvert ! videoscale ! video/x-raw,format=(string)RGBA,width=300,height=200 ! fakesink sync=true

It then uses the pipeline "sample" property to read frames as required.

This generally works fine, but after some time (from a few minutes to many hours) a memory leak develops which leads to the program being terminated. The application itself processes all samples the same (basically copies the image to a gl texture without holding any references and no control-flow variations).

Examining the log created with GST_DEBUG=GST_MEMORY:5 for a particular run shows that the number of calls to _gst_memory_init and _gst_memory_free are basically the same when the application works normally, but there is a significant deficit of calls to _gst_memory_free when it goes wrong:

   Timestamp
   0:36:45   50 more _init than _free
   0:52:43   61 more _init than _free
   0:59:45   55 more _init than _free
   1:09:00   76796  more _init than _free

How should I go about trying to work out what's going on?

--

Chris Tapp
opensource at keylevel.com
www.keylevel.com

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