GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 600491
large memory usage for recent documents
Last modified: 2011-11-01 01:39:03 UTC
Using Ubuntu 9.10 with gnome-shell mutter takes roughly 250 Megabyte of RAM without any foreground programs running (background: tomboy, skype, dropbox, ubuntu one) and up to 300 Mega with just 2 Workspaces (Firefox, System Monitor, Evolution). I suspect the cause in the 70+ pages of recent documents. Also the CPU-usage sometimes spikes to 90% for no apparent reason. Could be related, but not sure. Using a HP 6710b Notebook (with Intel GM965)
Just deleted all ~/.recently-used* The massive memory usage is gone.
Where do we go to delete all the recently-used?
You shouldn't have to delete your recently used; the memory usage is a bug we will fix.
~/ refers to your home directory. So there should be a (hidden) file like this one: /home/"jean"/.recently-used.xbel (where "jean" is your username) or short: ~/.recently-used.xbel There may be other files similar to this one (all starting with .recently-used) but with different suffixes. I would recommend to delete them as well.
gnome-shell issue not a Mutter issue
The memory usage part of this might be duplicate of bug #602853...
Mark, is this still an issue with 3.0?
I haven't come around to try 3.0 yet. Also the laptop got demoted to music player without internet... I'm not certain I could reproduce the error with my desktop, since it's a whole lot different (separate graphics card for starts) even with the old gnome-shell (never tried). I'll get back to you once I find the time.
There is #653064 that asks for pruning the file as well.
And btw. here is a blog post + script to trim the file: http://people.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2008-03.html#D23
It seems that this issue is OBSOLETE. Please reopen if it's not.