Useless memory consumption

I can confirm that this bug still exists in Intrepid_Ibex 8.10. The information give appears to be accurate.

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

This is still present in Jaunty_Jackalope 9.04.

Added the GST-project (gnome-system-tools) since this bug occurs when invoking the "shares-admin"-command. So maybe there's an issue with the front-end (shares-admin, part of gnome-system-tools) instead of a problem with the back-end (system-tools-backends).

Also updated the bug description with newer info.

In Karmic, I can confirm that the -m Platform script does not die after 3 minutes, consuming 10MB until reboot. I'll give a look at this problem.

Though, you mention in the description that there's a 90MB usage on first launch. I guess this comes from the package installation, isn't it? If that usage disappears after it's done, then that part is not a bug.

I don't think I completely understand you. Forgive me, English is not my native language...

You say that due to package installation there is an increase of 90MB in memory usage. But
1) I decline the request to install any packages upon request, by clicking on the close button. (see Step 2)
2) I never typed in any administration password and I didn't invoke the command while being root.
So there aren't any packages being installed, ergo it can't be the cause of the increased memory usage. Correct?

Thanks for looking into this issue and your quick reply.
Happy holidays!

So by "first time" you mean first time from fresh boot; there's no package installation involved then. I think you're slightly wrong about memory usage, because the fact that every SystemToolsBackends perl process uses 10MB doesn't mean you can sum up those values to get the total: there's shared memory (reported as SHR in top) for about 2MB each, which explains why a quick test reports that 70MB are used.

There's something I don't get here, because the scripts in themselves only represent a few KB, so I'd expect the total memory usage to be about 15MB. Maybe there's something we're doing wrong in the way we manage memory.

Anyway, the best approach for now would be to stop starting all modules, and instead start the one we use. We could divide the footprint by 5 or so.

Ah, now I see. By "first time", I meant, indeed, as long as you didn't install any packages as requested, since the install of the OS, and close the application. Basically doing nothing from the point of view of the shares-admin command.

You can be right about counting memory usage. I don't now very much about it and I didn't take the shared memory into account. So I won't disagree that, while the issue is still present, it can be less then 90MB, that's perfectly possible.

Starting only the modules you use, and preventing unnecessarily load to the system, would be my chose of preference as well. Unless this form of "pre-loading" has some tremendous performance benefits. But I doubt that.

At least with the gnome-system-tools 2.29.90 I've removed IfacesConfig since it wasn't used, which should gain something like 10MB. The main problem is still here, though, it's that perl doesn't share memory among modules.