power widget consumes all RAM

[victorz]

I first tried running gotop --layout kitchensink but nothing is displayed in the terminal, and my RAM usage shoots to maximum usage (have to stop the process at about 28/32 GB usage due to fear of system locking...). I then tried echo '3:power' | gotop -l - and the same thing happens.

Apologies if this is already resolved. I tried searching the commit history for "power", "RAM", and "memory"-related commit messages, but couldn't find anything relevant.

gotop version: v4.0.0 (20200607T220622)

OS/Arch: GNU/Linux 5.6.15-arch1-1

Terminal emulator: gnome-terminal

Any relevant hardware info: 32 GB 3200 MHz RAM, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core

tmux version: 3.1b

~/.local/state/gotop/errors.log: N/A -- it doesn't exist.

Please let me know if you need any more information from me and I shall try to provide it for you.

[xxxserxxx]

@victorz My environment is almost identical to yours, and I can't replicate this, so we'll have to dig deeper.

• Which package did you install?
  • From AUR? gotop, gotop-bin, or gotop-git?
  • Did you download one of the prebuilt binaries?
  • Did you compile it yourself?
• We have identical kernels & OSes; you have more memory (I have 8 on my laptop)
• Our CPUs differ; my laptop has an Intel CPU & 8 cores -- you have 12
• I tried in gnome-terminal 3.36.2-1, with (and without) tmux 3.1b
• Does gotop work without the kitchensink layout?
• It should start immediately, so if it doesn't you can ^c it -- would you mind running it with:

  echo power | gotop -l -
  

  and see if that works?
• Did you get the error log message from gotop --list paths?

The difference could be in the CPU, but that would be strange. I may provide a small program to see what the power subsystem is reporting to see if there's any leads there.

Thanks for the report.

[victorz]

@xxxserxxx Fellow Archer! I'll try my best to answer your questions below:

• Installed from AUR, the gotop-bin package.
• I also tried inside and outside of tmux
• gotop does work without the kitchensink layout; the default, minimal, and battery layouts work fine (even if I don't have a battery on this desktop PC)
• I tried echo power | gotop -l - and it does the same thing. Just a blank terminal and the memory starts to get eaten, fast. I am unable to ^C out of the process, so I have to e.g. pkill gotop from somewhere else.
• Not sure I fully understand the question regarding gotop --list paths, but there are no error messages in ~/.cache/gotop/errors.log, nor in ~/.local/state/gotop/errors.log. Both files exist now though, but are empty. There are also some *.0, *.1, and *.2 files in those same directories, but they are either empty or one actually had a message regarding negative amount of sent network data. 🤷‍♂️ Don't think it's relevant.

I hope this helps!

[xxxserxxx]

Hmm. I re-installed, this time from gotop-bin and -- as expected -- got the same version:

gotop v4.0.0 (20200607T220622)

I'm still not having trouble running it in gnome-terminal, so we're going to have to try a program. Can you compile Go code?

gotop --list paths tells you the path to the error log that it's writing to. That's the path you want to use; it should be in .cache, but since not everybody uses XDG, it can vary; XDG can even be replaced in Arch.

Did you ever create a gotop.conf file? It would be in ~/.config/gotop/gotop.conf if it exists. Are you running gotop with any command line parameters?

This tarball has a very small program to dump out the information from the battery library. Can you run it?

tar xzf gotop-battery.tar.gz
cd gotop-battery
cat main.go    # 22 LOC
go run .

and paste the results? Or let me know if it hangs?

gotop-battery.tar.gz

[victorz]

Thanks for getting back to this! Sorry I didn't reply sooner!

Did you ever create a gotop.conf file? It would be in ~/.config/gotop/gotop.conf if it exists. Are you running gotop with any command line parameters?

No to both -- I have no config file and I'm not running it using any command line options apart from those I listed in the issue description, so it's completely vanilla.

This tarball has a very small program to dump out the information from the battery library. Can you run it?

tar xzf gotop-battery.tar.gz
cd gotop-battery
cat main.go    # 22 LOC
go run .

and paste the results? Or let me know if it hangs?

gotop-battery.tar.gz

That program does not hang, and runs with the following output:

% go run .
entering test
got 0 battsexiting successfully

0 batteries seems reasonable as I have a desktop computer. (Probably not the main take-away from this output though lol) 👍

[xxxserxxx]

Hm. I don't know that I've ever run the power widget on a machine without a battery, so that's a good lead, thanks. Not sure why it would act that way, but it helps if I can reproduce it, and this may help me do that.

Since you don't have a battery, the power widget does nothing for you. May I recommend creating your own layout that doesn't have that widget, which would eliminate dead space?

Detailed instructions are here, but in short:

1. Download the kitchensink layout; name it whatever
2. Delete the line containing power
3. Run gotop -l <whatever>, where <whatever> is in either the current directory, or $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/gotop.