It's raining here and I decided to investigate the KStars "memory leak" issue with a stress test. I noticed that if I close the FITS Viewer window during an imaging session the RAM is not released on the RPi4. The result is that the memory allocated to KStars grows. Being bored and retired I decided to take this to the limit. I created a dummy imaging session with 100, 10 s subs and I closed the FITS viewer each time the image downloaded. As I expected, the RAM allocated to KStars grew from 912 MB to about 3000 MB at which time (I assume) swapping into VM starts to occur. I continued this process and observed the RAM allocation staying the same but the allocation of VM continues to grow. The system began to get very sluggish and when the VM allocation reached 6.1 GB, KStars crashed (probably because the RPi is trying to save itself). The control experiment where I don't close the FITS viewer results in a stable system with no memory allocation increase. The obvious solution to this issue is - don't close the FITS viewer window -but maybe this observation can be used to help locate a bug. I am using the latest Stellarmate version 1.8.0.

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