virt-manager memory consumption grows and not freed when a guest is shutdown

Solution In Progress - Updated -

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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