I’m working on a python application that uses both object tracking and GNSS fusion. Using the latest SDK i.e. 4.0.6. I’ve noticed my memory keeps increasing at about 1mb/second (though it’s slower to start with). After a lot of messing round with code, I think I’ve found the cause - if your main loop isn’t processing fast enough, memory starts to grow. In my case, object tracking seems to slow it down enough.
For example, in the sample geotracking.py if you run it as-is (with the GUI disabled), the memory starts around 291mb (as reported by psutil.Process().memory_info().rss), and grows slowly - after a minute it’s about 296mb. It’s pretty stable after that - increasing less than 1mb per minute. It may not stop increasing (i.e. still be a memory leak) - I’m not sure. But it’s pretty “good”.
However, as soon as you add a single time.sleep(0.1) in the main while loop, things get weird. Firstly, after about 5s it starts at 305mb (not 291mb). The memory grows slowly at first, but accelerates - within a minute it’s growing at multiple mb per second. I stopped it at 400mb, and it was still growing.
NB: my GPS is spitting out at 10hz, so if you’re testing at normal 1hz you may not see this.
time.sleep(1)may help reproduce in this case.
If you comment out fusion.ingest_gnss_data(input_gnss) i.e. so it’s still grabbing the GPS from GPSD but never ingesting it, the problem goes away. I think this makes it clear it’s something to do with the Zed GNSS fusion, and not anything else.
I’m not sure what’s going on here - it seems like a buffer is filling up because the main loop is getting behind the camera? Not sure. Anyway, is there a way to avoid this? In my application I can’t avoid the slow-down as I’m using object detection, which seems to limit the FPS, even in fast mode. It feels like I need a way to clear the buffer even though object detection is running slowly.