GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 781809
GNOME-shell memory leak on Ubuntu 16.04
Last modified: 2017-04-27 06:15:50 UTC
Created attachment 350519 [details] screenshot I am not sure if this issue is related to other bugs open, but gnome-shell 3.20.4 on my Ubuntu 16.04.2 will use up all of my RAM if I don't restart it over time. For example, in the past 5 hours, it has been rocketing from 120MB of memory to now 6.7 GiB of memory. I have seen it went up to 20GiB of memory in the past. I have asked on reddit and else where, but no solution so far. Extensions disabled and removed one by one but memory usage is still increasing over time. It leaks even I don't do anything on my computer. NVidia 381 driver is used for my Thinkpad P50 laptop, gdm3 3.20.1 installed, current kernel 4.8.0-49. I think the gnome version is 3.20.8. I am not a tech guy in the field. Let me know what else I can provide to help diagnose this issue. Thanks!
Now, it's using 10.9 GiB of RAM. I only use Chromium during the past hours on my computer.
Check bug 642652 and bug 777537 for ways to help diagnose the cause. For example you can run gnome-shell under valgrind (either regular valgrind or valgrind running massif); but note that it will be very slow, and you'll still have to run long enough for the issue to show up. For example, install the debug symbols package, run G_SLICE=always-malloc valgrind --tool=massif --pages-as-heap=yes gnome-shell --replace then use it (running slowly) for as long as you can manage, then running ms_print massif.out.[pid] and attach the output to either one of those bugs. It would of course be better if you run the latest version (or at least gnome-3.22), as gnome-3.20 probably won't get any fixes from upstream, and we won't have to bother seeing already fixed leaks. As for this bug, I think it should be closed as a duplicate, as we already have more than one generic leak bug already.
Sorry about the duplication. On Ubuntu 16.04, GNOME 3.20 is the latest one from the gnome3 ppa. I guess for a good test, I will need to recompile GNOME 3.24 or 3.22 from source with other modules?
(In reply to i2000s from comment #3) > Sorry about the duplication. On Ubuntu 16.04, GNOME 3.20 is the latest one > from the gnome3 ppa. I guess for a good test, I will need to recompile GNOME > 3.24 or 3.22 from source with other modules? That's quite the task really. You could upgrade to 17.04, which I think have 3.24. If you are really willing to go down the path of compiling yourself, I suggest you have a look at jhbuild.
I will still need stability for my workhorse. Maybe I will consider using other DEs to avoid this problem for now. Thank you for making it clear and your efforts on improving gnome-shell. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 777537 ***