Bug 295000

Summary:	yast uses way too much memory
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2	Reporter:	Lincoln Yeoh <lyeoh>
Component:	YaST2	Assignee:	Stanislav Visnovsky <visnov>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	openSUSE 10.3
Hardware:	Other
OS:	openSUSE 10.2
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	autoyast file to help reproduce problem

Description Lincoln Yeoh 2007-07-27 03:52:51 UTC

Yast is using too much RAM especially when doing "Software Management".

Example from colleague when _finally_ getting yast to display the package selection page:
root 9332 19.3 8.7 206788 181288 pts/12 R+ 11:28 0:45 /usr/lib/YaST2/bin/y2base menu ncurses --nothreads

180MB-200MB is an order of _magnitude_ too excessive for package management software- and this is in text mode too.

I have Windows XP virtual machines running in vmware that take up LESS MEMORY than yast!

It is true: I actually run windows xp in a 128MB virtual machine (total mem usage definite less than 200MB), and it works, even with "Windows Update", and other stuff running - youtube etc. You just can't watch too many "willitblend" videos at the same time ;).

So something is wrong with Yast if it needs 200MB just to add/remove packages. 

Please either fix yast or replace it with something significantly better. 

I sure hope suse is not aiming to beat Vista in memory usage.

p.s. yast is slow too (but I've already complained about that. I guess reading 200MB into memory inefficiently makes it slow).

Comment 1 Lincoln Yeoh 2007-07-27 04:04:08 UTC

By the way: on systems under memory pressure it's not inconceivable that yast could cause a machine to run out of memory even though the machine was fine before. 

After all, who expects something like yast to use the same or more memory than ALL their apache+db+squid processes combined?

Possible scenario?
system=fine, just a bit loaded and busy, 
then:
run yast
then: 
system runs out of memory and not nice stuff happens.

Comment 2 Cristian Rodríguez 2007-07-27 08:54:36 UTC

Lincoln.. please search bugzilla before opening bugs, this issue is probably the most reported one in history... it is so reported that I dont know what bug to choose to mark yours as duplicated, there are probably hundreds of them.

This is fixed in 10.3alpha6.

marking as duplicated of  215649 where part of the situation is discussed in detail.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 215649 ***

Comment 3 Lincoln Yeoh 2007-07-27 11:16:49 UTC

I did search bugzilla.

I wasn't complaining about zmd using memory, I was complaining about yast itself.

I've tried running yast without zmd installed and it still uses lots of memory, maybe not 200MB (the 200MB only seems to occur on my colleague's machine), but it does go above >100MB (120+MB) on various different machines we have.

So I don't see this as related to bug 215649. 

Maybe it's a duplicate of another bug, but it's hard to tell from the search results.

How to reproduce:

Do the usual KDE default install (I'll try to attach an autoyast - passwords if any will be = rnd123).

Run yast online update configuration, do the usual.

Exit yast.

Run top on command line in one shell, press M to sort by memory.
Run yast, 
see that yast uses quite a lot of mem already.
Select "Software Management", and wait and you'll see yast start to use more an more memory till > 100MB resident.

This happens whether or not yast is run in GUI or ncurses mode.

Comment 4 Lincoln Yeoh 2007-07-27 11:23:49 UTC

Created attachment 153522 [details]
autoyast file to help reproduce problem

Attached is autoyast file.

passwords for the accounts are rnd123
normal user = rnd

Installed from:
3880814592 Dec  1  2006 openSUSE-10.2-GM-DVD-i386.iso

md5sum:
12b0f2fabb4d41586601f787d33ebc34  openSUSE-10.2-GM-DVD-i386.iso

Installed into 384MB vmware machine - 8GB disk, 384MB RAM, type = "Other Linux 2.6.x".

Comment 5 Cristian Rodríguez 2007-07-27 12:07:26 UTC

You are confused, it is not yast that uses too much memory, it is a general performance problem of  libzypp, and again, this **is** fixed in 10.3alpha6 (and I suspect it will not be fixed in 10.2)

For some reason I cannot find the bug(s) number ( they are probably private)

Comment 6 Stanislav Visnovsky 2007-07-30 11:52:52 UTC

No, we cannot backport libzypp from 10.3 to 10.2