Arch Linux

DWilliams

Member

From: Everywhere

Registered: 2009-11-22

Posts: 119

Gnome3 seems to leak memory until the system is unusable

I recently upgraded to Gnome 3. I've had a number of problems but am working on getting them resolved. Currently the biggest one is probably that the gnome-shell process apparently has a big memory leak as far as I can tell.

Right after booting it uses a fairly small amount of memory, but within a few hours it's usually at 1GB or more. About once a day I'll be in the middle of some game or something and the system will almost completely lock up and be unusable. I can't even get any programs to launch. At best, if I can actually get to the launcher, it will tell me "could not allocate memory" if I try to launch a terminal or system monitor, and it doesn't seem to want to let me switch off to different virtual terminals either. The only solution seems to be a hard reset when it does this, and when it comes back up and does a fsck it's always cleaning up a bunch of orphaned inodes. When it's locked up like this I can hear the hard drive going crazy reading and/or writing data, so my suspicion is that it's filling up my system memory then filling up my swap space, then everything starts falling apart and the system becomes unusable.

I googled for gnome-shell memory leaks and most people seem to report it only leaking like 200MB or something relatively small. What can I do here?

siriusb

Member

From: Hungary

Registered: 2010-01-01

Posts: 422

Re: Gnome3 seems to leak memory until the system is unusable

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24033

Last edited by siriusb (2011-05-05 18:15:54)