mate-settings-daemon using all my RAM?

[baj]

Hello,

Last week I upgraded my HP 8770W laptop to Mint Mate v17.1 x64. Despite having a number of items to figure out, I have been liking v17.1 very much.

My laptop was chugging along today and suddenly got slow, and the fan was running higher than usual. I fired up System Monitor and found that mate-settings-daemon was using 22GB of RAM (I have 24GB) and 128% CPU (it's an i7 quad-core)

The only change I made that I can think of today was that I removed my google-calendar from T-bird/Lightning (was having issues with that). Doesn't seem like it would be related.

The system locked up before I could even post this message. Had to do a hard power-down. Booted back up and had the same problem, I fired up System Monitor right away and watched the RAM usaged for mate-settings-daemon ramp up from about 60MB when I first got it open to 22GB. I couldn't even get this message posted before the system locked again, I finally had to boot from the Mint 17 USB stick I made for testing. Part of the lock-up issue may be I have no swap defined, I've been using Mint on this laptop for two years w/o one. But even if I did have swap defined, the rate at which the memory usage was climbing it just would have given me a couple more minutes before lockup.

One other thing, after the lockups my networking didn't auto-start. I had set it up manually from the terminal.

Any thoughts on what could be causing this? Not much of relavence came up when I searched on it.

Thanks,
-Brad

[all41]

Brad,
this is very similar to what is being reported here:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 8&t=159793

[baj]

Thanks All41! It's weird, I searched this site for "mate-settings-daemon" and got no matches. Maybe I fat-fingered it and my brain didn't catch it.

So my "user" file was in a slightly different path

/home/<usenamer>/.cache/dconf/user

but sure enough, the owner was root. I renamed it and booted from my HDD again and that has taken care of it. The new user file was created with my user as the owner. Mate-settings-daemon is now playing nice, using 0% cpu and a constant 5.5MB of RAM over the last 20 minutes. The LMDE users who had the problem mentioned it could return though, so I'll have to keep an eye on it. It was said that running the Software Update Manager and entering the root password can be good way to change the ownership of the user file to root, but I haven't set up the root account on this PC (yet), and as I understand it the root password is the user password by default, so might need to play around with that and keep and eye on the user file. I also did not run the Software Update Manager today.

In the LMDE forum, they said the permanent fix was to remove systemd. On LMDE they claim it's use in manual configuration only -- if you didn't configure it yourself, it's not used. Do you happen to know if Linux Mint Mate v17.1 x64 requires systemd or if it's for manual configuration only also?

Thanks,
-Brad

ps. I'm not sure if it's related or not, but I lost my menu button from the panel again during this issue. Guess I will have to do another reset.

[raptir]

If you're running Linux Mint 17.1 you should not have systemd installed. Linux Mint Debian Edition has it installed because Debian Jessie uses systemd now.