[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio - high memory usage

[Arun Raghavan]

On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 21:23 +0200, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 09:28 +0530, Arun Raghavan wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 00:34 +0100, Thomas Meyer wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > should pulseaudio actually use that much memory?
> > > 
> > > $ cat status
> > > Name:	pulseaudio
> > > State:	S (sleeping)
> > > Tgid:	1972
> > > Ngid:	0
> > > Pid:	1972
> > > PPid:	1
> > > TracerPid:	0
> > > Uid:	1000	1000	1000	1000
> > > Gid:	500	500	500	500
> > > FDSize:	64
> > > Groups:	4 6 10 11 36 63 464 468 469 500 
> > > VmPeak:	 2326912 kB
> > > VmSize:	 2326912 kB
> > > VmLck:	       0 kB
> > > VmPin:	       0 kB
> > > VmHWM:	 1843468 kB
> > > VmRSS:	 1843468 kB
> > > VmData:	 1987020 kB
> > > VmStk:	     136 kB
> > > VmExe:	      80 kB
> > > VmLib:	   15592 kB
> > > VmPTE:	    4164 kB
> > > VmSwap:	     524 kB
> > > Threads:	3
> > > SigQ:	0/62970
> > > SigPnd:	0000000000000000
> > > ShdPnd:	0000000000000000
> > > SigBlk:	0000000000000000
> > > SigIgn:	0000000000381000
> > > SigCgt:	0000000180004a43
> > > CapInh:	0000000000000000
> > > CapPrm:	0000000000000000
> > > CapEff:	0000000000000000
> > > CapBnd:	0000001fffffffff
> > > Seccomp:	0
> > > Cpus_allowed:	1
> > > Cpus_allowed_list:	0
> > > Mems_allowed:	1
> > > Mems_allowed_list:	0
> > > voluntary_ctxt_switches:	12348713
> > > nonvoluntary_ctxt_switches:	4858656
> > 
> > Have you tried interpreting what those numbers actually mean? This might
> > help: http://elinux.org/Runtime_Memory_Measurement
> > 
> > Note that our SHM usage can cause virtual memory size look large, and
> > this is a red herring.
> 
> I don't know if I read the output correctly, it looks like PulseAudio
> consumes nearly 2 gigs of memory? Can SHM alone cause that?

Jeez, that is totally my bad for missing that.

> Thomas, you could try running pulseaudio in valgrind. The command to do
> that:
> 
> valgrind --leak-check=full pulseaudio --realtime=no
> 
> To get a leak report, quit pulseaudio with "pactl exit".
> 
> --realtime=no is there because otherwise, at least on my machine,
> pulseaudio gets easily killed due to excessive cpu use in realtime mode.
> (That sounds like a bug, btw - shouldn't rtkit just demote the
> scheduling mode back to normal, not outright kill pulseaudio?)
> 
> Getting useful reports probably requires installing debug symbols for
> pulseaudio first.
> 
> I tried valgrind today myself (which I do way too seldomly), and I found
> one memory leak in module-card-restore, which gets triggered when
> changing card profiles. I pushed a fix for that to master. There's still
> one memory leak in alsa-lib, which I expect to be triggered once per
> loaded instance of module-alsa-card, so it's not very serious. I didn't
> bother tracking down the bug in alsa-lib.

If you have the it handy, can you dump the trace somewhere on bugzilla
so we don't lose track?

-- Arun