[GRLUG] pulseaudio using a TON of memory

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 08:28:31AM -0400, John-Thomas Richards wrote:
> I just glanced at Conky and noticed my RAM usage is higher than I've
> ever seen it (currently using 4.7GiB).  I ran top and sorted by memory
> usage.  Here are my top five results.
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  4116 jtr       20   0 4140m 3.8g 3328 S    1 48.5   6:50.98 pulseaudio
>  9737 jtr       20   0  843m 307m  36m R    2  3.9  52:04.12 firefox-bin
> 15381 jtr       20   0  921m 122m  24m S    0  1.5  36:43.79 plugin-containe
> 24336 jtr       20   0  645m 109m  71m S    0  1.4   0:18.84 soffice.bin
>  5615 root      20   0  190m  94m  22m S    6  1.2  46:46.62 Xorg
> 
> Any ideas what is causing a *sound server* to use so much RAM?
> 
> (Running LMDE / Debian Wheezy, AMD64)
> -- 
> john-thomas

Turns out the zombie apocalypse has begun:

auerbach ~ # ps -el | grep Z
F S   UID   PID  PPID  C PRI  NI ADDR SZ WCHAN  TTY          TIME CMD
0 Z  1000  8688  7177  0  80   0 -     0 -      ?        00:00:01 pavucontrol <defunct>

Killing pulseaudio freed the RAM (naturally) but it really bugs me that
it used so much to start with.  Could it be related to the above zombie
process (pavucontrol is "pulseaudio volume control")?
-- 
john-thomas
------
The only gift is giving to the poor; All else is exchange.
Thiruvalluvar, poet (c. 30 BCE)

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