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dillebidum

Member

Registered: 2016-09-21

Posts: 19

[SOLVED] Two instances of gnome-shell running - is this normal?

Hello.
I have a problem where two instances of gnome-shell are running, both in the Wayland session and the X session. One is started by gdm (yes, its user) and one is started by my user.
The problem with this is it's taking a LOT of RAM.
I would like to know if this is normal, and if it is not, would greatly appreciate an answer.

More details:

Each gnome-shell process has its own Xwayland or Xorg process, which takes up even more RAM.
I log in with GDM (pretty obvious if you read the top part).
This happened randomly before the Wayland update that came out today (September 21, 2016). Now it's happening every time, even on non-Wayland sessions. 0_o
I used to use gdm-plymouth. I disabled its service before uninstalling it.
I do not use the testing repos.

Last edited by dillebidum (2016-09-21 12:35:07)

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A normal Arch user. A KISS lover. YouTube-in-files downloader. Hater of 32-bit binaries. Power user of virtual machines.
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Alad

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From: Bagelstan

Registered: 2014-05-04

Posts: 2,412

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Re: [SOLVED] Two instances of gnome-shell running - is this normal?

It's a known issue, though I can't find the bug report right now. In any case, the two processes are by design and changing it is no priority to the developers. One step forward, three backwards ...

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dillebidum

Member

Registered: 2016-09-21

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] Two instances of gnome-shell running - is this normal?

It's a known issue, though I can't find the bug report right now. In any case, the two processes are by design and changing it is no priority to the developers. One step forward, three backwards ...

Thank you for the information.
So, I did some testing on this. These were tested in a Wayland session, but I think the results will be the same for a X.org session.

Killing the GDM user's gnome-shell process does nothing to GNOME, but when you log out it goes to the TTY where GDM started. And because GDM's gnome-shell process is not there, there's the "systemd TTY" instead of GDM.
Killing your user's gnome-shell process causes the desktop to quit (obviously!)but GDM which is still at TTY1 thinks the user is logged in. And it's right. The user is logged in, his/her desktop just isn't there.

So, I'm guessing GDM just depends on its own (heavy) gnome-shell process. Having GDM restart when you log out would be better, because having it running all the time will make things laggy. I guess I can make a bash script to do that, but a rewrite would be better. Anyway, thanks.

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A normal Arch user. A KISS lover. YouTube-in-files downloader. Hater of 32-bit binaries. Power user of virtual machines.
If that isn't enough for you, look here.