Comment 25 for bug 981224

Same problem here, i have Ubuntu 12.04 x64 and kazam 1.0.6 'NCC-2893' and gstreamer 0.10.36-1ubuntu0.1

After 5 minutes of screen recording (vp8 or h264, does not matter) the RES memory slowly goes through the roof (>2GB for kazam process) and it obviously almost freezes my laptop with 4gb of RAM. I'm recording 1280x800 with (or without) audio, 15fps.

I have a Radeon Xpress 200 card, and have tried to screencast from both Unity and Gnome classic.

I suspect this has something to do with GStreamer and the method of capture for X11 (x11grab maybe? no idea) that is buggy.

I have noticed the process size does not increase if nothing happens on the screen. If i just keep it idle and watch htop while recording, kazam barely grows in size. If i however switch windows, move the mouse, etc, it starts to grow fast, about 20megs per second...

Obviously gstreamer does something wrong here and does not deallocate the encoded screen captures after encoding them, they linger in the memory, even if they also get written on disk at the same time. I say the encoded screens, because if i sit idle then the compression ratio is obviously bigger and the following captured screens are smaller in size, hence probably why the process stops growing...

Right now kazam is not usable for me, any help would be appreciated

Thanks
Mihai