Arch Linux

themusicalduck

Member

Registered: 2011-07-04

Posts: 147

Gnome consumes all of my memory after a couple of days idle

I realise Gnome has memory issues, but I feel like this is too ridiculous to not be down to a specific problem.

If I leave Gnome running  (say, like I did over this weekend), I'll come back to have the entirety of my memory and swap consumed. Last it happened, usage for Gnome shell was 63% according to htop. At that point I have to either wait for it to slowly reboot once I get to a tty or force power down the machine. I often have to restart Gnome during the middle of the day too to clear up memory.

This machine has 6GB of RAM and 8GB of swap. I don't have the same problem on my home PC per se, because it has 32GB RAM and I tend to switch it off every night.

The only two extensions I have running are Frippery panel favorites and Topicons.

I'll disable them both tonight and see what memory is like in the morning, but is there anything else at all that might be causing this? Or anything I can do? At this rate I think I'm going to be looking at alternative DEs.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,384

Re: Gnome consumes all of my memory after a couple of days idle

If you're on Wayland try GNOME on Xorg or vice versa would be my suggestion

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Gnome consumes all of my memory after a couple of days idle

IIRC using proprietary nvidia driver has resulted in gnome leaking memory for some people. I'm not sure whether those issues should be fixed though.

Before switching desktops altogether, you could wait to test if the issue persists in Gnome 3.30 that will be released this week.

themusicalduck

Member

Registered: 2011-07-04

Posts: 147

Re: Gnome consumes all of my memory after a couple of days idle

I'm using Xorg. I did use Wayland previously on my laptop (which is being repaired..) before switching to Xorg for reasons. On this desktop I'm using now, it doesn't seem to work well (everything was stuttering).

Maybe tonight I'll leave it open on a Wayland session and see if there is a difference.

No Nvidia drivers, I'm using Intel onboard.

I disabled the two left on extensions last night and this morning memory use for Gnome is at 34.5%, so no improvement it looks like.