Bug#1032259: conky: High CPU usage

[Antoine Le Gonidec]

Source: conky
Version: 1.18.1-1
Severity: normal

Before the upgrade to 1.18.1, Conky had a low CPU usage, around 2~5%.
Since the upgrade to 1.18.1, it has a much higher CPU usage, around 10~20%. In addition, Xorg CPU usage is increased to 15~30%.

Reverting to Conky 1.17.0-1 the CPU usage goes back to the low values.

I have not tried the upstream releases yet, but I can do that and run a bisect to find the first commit increasing CPU usage. Please tell me if that would be helpful.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
APT prefers unstable-debug
APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'oldstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

[Antoine Le Gonidec]

I bumped the severity of the bug report, because the memory leak could cause more issues than the increase in CPU load. Feel free to change the severity level if you think I did not chose the right one.

[Antoine Le Gonidec]

I noticed that Xorg memory usage grows over time to unexpected levels. I think it started at the same time than the high CPU usage so it might be related, but I do not know how to make sure of that.

[Vincent Cheng]

On Thu, Mar 2, 2023 at 8:39 AM Antoine Le Gonidec
<deb...@dotslashplay.it> wrote:
>
> I noticed that Xorg memory usage grows over time to unexpected levels. I think it started at the same time than the high CPU usage so it might be related, but I do not know how to make sure of that.

Please bisect if you have time and report this issue directly upstream
to their bug trakcer[1]. Thanks!

Regards,
Vincent

[1] https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/issues

[Antoine Le Gonidec]

I think I can confirm that the high Xorg memory usage is due to this update, I am now sitting at 3.30GB after a dozen hours.

To make really sure of the cause, I am going to revert to the 1.17 build of Conky and let it run for a dozen hours too.

In the meantime I am bumping the bug severity again to prevent this memory leak to reach Bookworm, once again feel free to revert that if you think that is not such a big deal (I guess not everyone have X sessions running for several days).

[Antoine Le Gonidec]

The bug is fixed upstream, with their new release v1.18.2: https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/releases/tag/v1.18.2

Here is the targeted update: https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/pull/1444
I attached a copy of the .diff for convenience.