Maybe its not actually a memory leak, but I was suffering with mate-panel increasing from a boot level of around 14-15MB expanding substantially to the order of 1.5GB: I could not find any real, or apparently relevant, help online.
So explore, that’s what Linux users do isn’t it?
I dont reboot so often, but paid special attention to mate-panel when I did. My panel, one of several, is normally hidden with a semi-transparent background of plain colour, nothing too innocuous.
Every time I swept my mouse over the panel to make it visible, on hiding the memory use increased (about) 2MB – changing the background to none (‘theme’), the memory increase fell to almost nothing.
There was still a small increase, so noticing I had left the test setup with transparency on (even though background colour was none), a quick reset and back to fully opaque – now I cannot see any significant memory increase.
Having several panels running makes it difficult to see exactly what is causing the increases, but it was clear in the beginning, every time the panel appeared, memory increased 2MB.
The issue appears to be in the having transparency to any but ‘fully opaque’ (whether you are using that setting or not?)
BTW, I had a similar memory problem with wnck-applet (dont have the details to hand) that was resolved by changing the style somehow ..
I’ll continue to monitor the situation and update if necessary, but as of now its considered fixed for me. Aren’t you glad I didn’t have to mention the terminal even once?
The panel info:
- not 100% width
- contains notifications and several shortcuts (and drawers)