gnome-terminal has a weight problem

[Jonathan Corbet]

Ever since I updated to post-FC6 rawhide on my x86-64 system,
gnome-terminal has been unreliable.  It occasionally crashes, often at
strange times.  I put it into Bugzilla
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=217378) but have
not heard any more - how dare people not fix my bug (for free) within 24
hours?!?  :)

I am curious, though, as to whether I'm really the only one who sees
this.  The problem appears to be related to a memory leak.  A quick ps
on my system shows:

 corbet   14974  0.0  5.4 333732 55532 ?        Ssl  Nov27   0:13 gnome-terminal

A 300MB address space (50MB resident) is a bit on the hefty side, even
considering that we're talking about a GNOME application here.  Doing
the same thing an hour later shows this:

 corbet   14974  0.0  5.0 341236 52032 ?        Ssl  Nov27   0:14 gnome-terminal

Whereas when I put in the BZ entry I had this:

 corbet   14974  0.0  2.3 295520 24288 ?        Rsl  07:54   0:02 gnome-terminal

In other words, the thing is growing at a fast and steady rate.

Personally, I think that a terminal emulator should know its place, and
gnome-terminal has failed to keep within its bounds.  Is this something
special it's doing for me, or is it a wider problem?

Thanks,

jon