ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Colin Ian King <colin.king@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/06/14 18:37, Alan Pope wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm writing to the list to raise awareness and ask for help with a
> general problem with recent images. I've noticed on a few occasions
> that my phone has been running hot and often the UI is unresponsive
> around the same time. Usually this happens after the phone has been on
> for some hours - often more than 6 hours continuous uptime.
> 
> Most recently last night my phone was unusable after being sat on my
> desk for a few hours with some applications running. I was able to run
> a few basic commands before it froze up completely. This was on the
> latest devel-proposed image on a Nexus 4.
> 
> Here's the only output I managed to grab and paste before it froze:-
> 
> http://paste.ubuntu.com/7588543/
> 
> I've noticed individual apps such as Music & Web browser have this
> problem, but also Unity itself seems to consume more RAM on later
> images than it previously did. A couple of bugs along these lines:-
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/webbrowser-app/+bug/1326378
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/music-app/+bug/1289804
> 
> Right now those of us running proposed images tend to flash them
> daily, sometimes twice daily, and reboot to run autopilot tests or
> other development related tasks. What we don't tend to do often is
> exercise applications over a longer period of hours, or days.
> 
> What can we do to improve our awareness of memory leaking/eating applications?
> What tools can we use to identify the issues and root cause?
> How can we continually measure these memory leaks so we can more
> easily see positive/negative impact of our changes?

I suggest trying out smemstat which is my in my PPA: ppa:colin-king/white

see: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~cking/smemstat/

one can run this with a suitable delay and capture any memory changes
over a specified number of iterations.  The data can be also output to a
JSON formatted file for later processing and analysis.

Colin



> 
> I'd appreciate the help from the experts in this area, as these issues
> make the phone somewhat unusable beyond a few hours.
> 
> Thanks,
>