Quoting Serge Hallyn (serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com):
Hi,
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libvirt/+bug/1201938 documents a memory leak we're seeing in libvirt. I've reproduced it in 1.0.2, 1.0.6, and an hourly snapshot from yesterday morning (which is built at https://launchpad.net/~serge-hallyn/+archive/libvirt-mav)
To reproduce it, I define and start one domain and run virt-manager locally (just leaving it running in a vnc server). The RSS as observed by top grows over time, starting at 10M and becoming 87M in about 12 hours.
When I stop the running vm, the memleak does seem to stop. Presumably having >1 domain would speed up the memleak (explaining the original bug reporter's woes)
No, the memory leak did not stop altogether with the VM stopped. Since sending that email RSS has gone up by about 2M.