Dear Maintainer,
*** Please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***
* What led up to the situation?
I recently updated from wheezy to jessie. This is *not* a clean installation.
Upon starting a gnome-flashback session, deja-dup-monitor loads into the
background.
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
Loading of the monitor appears to be the default and is automatically performed
without user intervention. It is possible that I have a prior setting (from
wheezy) that would cause it to load, but I do not recall having deja dup
actively running or scheduled.
* What was the outcome of this action?
The deja-dup-monitor rapidly consumed all available memory (on my machine,
about 16 Gigabytes) and started to push the system into swap space. Desktop
response became sluggish and erratic as the system struggled to keep up. I was
able to launch the system monitor after two minutes of disk thrashing, allowing
me to stop the process and observe what was happening. Currently as I look at
it, deja-dup-monitor holds 14.6Gbyte of RAM, and the system has consumed
3.9Gbyte of swap space (out of 14.9Gbyte total).
On a system with much lower memory limits - say only a gigabyte of RAM - this
could bring the entire system to its knees and make the machine unresponsive
for an extended period of time. An inexperienced user would probably make the
choice to power down the machine and restart it, only to face the same issue
again once they logged back in.
* What outcome did you expect instead?
Deja-dup-monitor should NOT consume 90% or more of the available RAM. For the
time being, I will set a ulimit on available memory, which is an odd way to
contain this on what amounts to a single-user machine.