(Huge) Memleak on Fedora 14?

[horazont]

Hi all,

Before I start, I already did some web research and stumbled upon this possibly related thread, but I did not get any help out of it.
So, here is my problem: I use VLC to play some video. I also have a lot of other stuff running, a normal desktop (firefox, thunderbird, you name it). Everything is fine until rsync backup kicks in. VLC starts to lag (which is okay, as rsync may drain the whole available Harddisk I/O for a second sometimes). But VLC also starts to consume more and more memory. Depending on the amount of the rsync I/O load, I have sometimes only 3 seconds to react on that before vlc has my whole 4 GB of RAM allocated, so this can be pretty severe. As it won't stop allocating, the system is dead at that point, despite having swap, cause everything gets swapped and the attempt to run a killall takes too long, vlc has allocated the swap by that time.
I also notice that problem when I have torrents in the background (mainly when they get written to or read from the harddisk), but its not that severe then.

I would like to help at debugging that, I also have the usual debugging tools available (gdb, valgrind) as I am a dev myself, but I have not found an option to limit valgrinds heap yet, as crashing the system would not help when trying to investigate the problem. So if I can give some input, just ask please.

greetings

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Make sure you are not using PulseAudio.

[horazont]

Thanks for the fast reply! I will try using alsa. Just curious, what has pulseaudio to do with this?

greetings

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

The PulseAudio plugin in VLC is buggy.

[horazont]

Hmm… With the vlc alsa plugin I get sound interruptions though… Is there a fix expected for the pulseaudio-plugin-problem?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

That (memory leak) problem is fixed in VLC 1.2 already. Then the ALSA plugin is known to work very poorly against PulseAudio. It's really meant to run directly against the hardware.

Unfortunately, PulseAudio came and changed everything in how audio must be output on Linux. But they did not help the VideoLAN project at all in updating, neither did anyone else. It cannot work like that.

[Owyn2]

Ran into same problem (again) on Ubuntu 10.04. I had switched to Movie Player as my primary and only used VLC when I had problems with a specific video on Movie Player. Got a problem, used VLC, phone rang, paused player...

Anyway, researched problem properly this time and updated to VLC 1.1.11 via lucid-bleed per instructions on site. Unfortunately I think I still have specific need for pulse audio. Still checking options in that area.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ubuntu.html

The update fixed the specific problem with Movie Player, probably due to the associated updates (lots). An unintended but pleasant consequence. Re-tested after update JIC.

I noticed that you indicated that the problem is fixed in VLC 1.2.git. I assume that this means it is not fixed in VLC 1.1.11. Will VLC 1.2 be backported to lucid-bleed when released?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

The memory leak is fixed in VLC 1.1.11 but there are other issues with PulseAudio anyway.

And I cannot talk for Lucid-bleed people.

[Owyn2]

Thanks for the feedback.