KDE consumes high memory on RHEL7

Solution In Progress - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2
  • polkit-0.112-6.el7_2.x86_64

Issue

  • High memory utilization causes on RHEL 7 due to polkit.
Top MEM-using processes: 
    USER      PID    %CPU  %MEM  VSZ-MiB  RSS-MiB  TTY    STAT  START  TIME      COMMAND  
    root      17523  0.0   44.9  25231    14399    ?      Sl    Apr21  9:03      kdeinit4: kded4 [kdeinit]

Resolution

  • update polkit package to polkit-0.112-7.el7_2

Root Cause

  • Previously, the polkit client library did not correctly free memory when listing available actions, which could cause programs to terminate. With this update, the library frees the memory correctly.
  • There was a memory leak in EnumerateActions call results handler that causes KDE to leak massive amounts of memory.

Diagnostic Steps

  • Start kde.
  • Memory will start to grow over a couple of days.
  • KDE will use up over 60% of available memory.
  • Version-Release number of selected component.
# grep -i polkit installed-rpms 
   polkit-0.112-6.el7_2.x86_64

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