Substantial memory leak on aarch64 and x86_64 architectures

[kseistrup]

TL;DR: Profanity ate 1 GB swap in less than 15 days

I have profanity running on a RPi4 (aarch64 architecture) that is running ArchLinuxARM. Profanity receives notifications from e.g. cron jobs and casual interpersonal chat, altogether less than a couple of hundred messages daily — some days substantially less.

The RPi4 has 4 GB RAM + 1 GB swap. Usually no swap is used at all, so at first I didn't notice when free -tk reported that used and free swap had swapped places, so to speak: 100% used swap and 0% free. This was when the RPi4 and profanity had been up for slightly less than 15 days.

A ps ux revealed that the profanity process had gobbled up 2.5+ GB RAM, including all of the available 1 GB swap. Taking profanity down released all of the used swap, except ~40 MB.

Expected Behavior

Ideally, profanity should not keep gobbling up RAM.

Current Behavior

Launching profanity again, this is what I noticed (numbers taken from ps ux):

HH:MM     VSZ     RSS
-----··------··------
??:??  188208  163968
18:58  249260  225152
21:42  286228  262016
07:24  346020  321792

HH:MM is wallclock hours and minutes.

I tried the same thing on a x86_64 desktop pc, running ArchLinux:

HH:MM     VSZ     RSS
-----··------··------
??:??   55120   33976
18:13  280880   40264
22:13  316360   77128
07:21  360808  121544

Possible Solution

I haven't got a clue.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

1. Launch profanity in a terminal emulator
2. Regularly run e.g. ps ux | rg pro[f]anity to see its increasing memory consumption

Context

N/A

Environment

• Give us the version and build information output generated by profanity -v

$ profanity -v
Profanity, version 0.14.0
Copyright (C) 2012 - 2019 James Booth <[email protected]>.
Copyright (C) 2019 - 2023 Michael Vetter <[email protected]>.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Build information:
XMPP library: libstrophe
Desktop notification support: Enabled
OTR support: Enabled (libotr 4.1.1)
PGP support: Enabled (libgpgme 1.23.2)
OMEMO support: Enabled
C plugins: Enabled
Python plugins: Enabled (3.11.6)
GTK icons/clipboard: Disabled
GDK Pixbuf: Enabled

• If you could not yet build profanity, mention the revision you try to build from
• Operating System/Distribution: ArchLinux + ArchLinuxARM
• curl: 8.5.0
• expat: 2.5.0
• glib2: 2.78.3
• glibc: 2.38
• libassuan: 2.5.6
• libgcrypt: 1.10.3
• libgpg-error: 1.47
• libgpgme: 1.23.2
• libnotify: 0.8.3
• libotr: 4.1.1
• libsignal-protocol-c: 2.3.3
• libstrophe: 0.12.3
• ncurses: 6.4_20230520
• python: 3.11.6
• readline: 8.2.007

Options used when building the package can be seen here:

• https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/profanity/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD?ref_type=heads

Cheers.