virt-manager memory consumption grows and not freed when a guest is shutdown
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL7)
- kernel Version: 3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64
- virt-manager-0.10.0-20.el7.noarch
Issue
While running virt-manager, the amount of the memory usage for the virt-manager process keeps increasing steadily.
Immediately after running virt-manager.
# ps aux | grep [v]irt-manager
root 8654 6.2 2.6 789352 48292 ? Ssl 10:35 0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/share/virt-manager/virt-manager
Nine hours after running virt-manager.
# ps aux | grep [v]irt-manager
root 8654 1.5 18.1 1958740 328636 ? Ssl 10:35 8:23 /usr/bin/python /usr/share/virt-manager/virt-manager
As a result, RSS (Resident Set Size) increased about 280MB.
Resolution
At the time of this writing, the workaround is to kill the offending virt-manager PID and then launch the GUI Virtual Machine Manager. A new PID will be assigned to the virt-manager process..
A Request for Feature Enhancement (RFE) has been filed to address the memory consumption on the virt-manager process, this RFE is being tracked in a private Red Hat Bug #1015413. For more information on this feature, please open a case with Red Hat Red Hat Support.
Root Cause
virt-manager memory is not released when a guest is shutdown.
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