memory consumption

[Chris Murphy]

4G RAM qemu-kvm

Test case: boot the image, wait 5 minutes (there is a settle period
during which services are still doing things and memory usage isn't
stable), launch Terminal and run 'free -m', launch System Monitor and
read Memory value.

**Fedora 32 workstation live**

$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3922         617        1685          11        1620        2987
Swap:             0           0           0

System monitor: 950 MiB

**Fedora 33 workstation live**

$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3922         619        1902          11        1400        2997
Swap:          1960           0        1960

System monitor: 941 MiB

Weird that 'free -m' shows used is 2M more for F33, but System monitor
shows 9M less. And also the ~320M difference between the two tools'
report for memory in-use. The amount of installed memory (the total)
does affect these. I'm not sure why.

But that's a hermetically sealed setup. I suspect PackageKit. I've
seen it take upwards of 15% RAM in some cases. Currently on my laptop
it's taking up nearly 1G on its own

25Kb   36Kb   CPU%   MEM%  VIRT  RES
PID USER          TIME+ THR  NI S  R/s W/s  Command
                                       0.0    11.9  1.44G 932M
2112 root           2:19 3     0 S    ? ?    /usr/libexec/packagekitd

After 'systemctl restart packagekit' and waiting 5 minutes for it to
settle, it's only taking up 24M. Does this suggest a memory leak?

[Chris Murphy]

Filed a bug against PackageKit
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1896964

I wonder if this can't be fixed if we should consider creating a timer
unit to restart it every once in a while. 932M is not acceptable, and
as noted in the bug report, no meaningful amount is marked as dirty
pages so it's not subject to eviction.

--
Chris Murphy