Help test memory leak fixes in 18.04 LTS

Desktop
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@1linuxguy That Snap will not stay at 3.26 for long! (But your question is a bit off-topic.)

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Well, yes and no, because us, mere mortals, we watch the gnome-shell process with System Monitor. So yeah, it may be off topic, but itā€™s related, kind of.

Ok, Iā€™m out. :slight_smile:

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I tested the patch, but didnā€™t see any difference at all. Installed it in a VirtualBox PC. Have been using the machine for about half an hour after the reboot and I see Gnome-Shell memory consumption is just increasing. It was about 328MB and it jumped to 400MB after installing Gnome-Tweaks tool. At the time of writing this post the only application open is the System Monitor and the memory consumption is still 400MB with the only tendency to increase.

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Agreed that this is slightly off-topic but: This is a known problem with all GUI snaps and with no easy solution apparently :cry: :cry: :cry: Please also check out the posts linked from the one Iā€™ve linked and +1 relevant comments by Liking them :slight_smile: (or contribute suggestions on how to get the issue fixed (the bottleneck seems to be design for this one rather than programming), it seems to be a slowness in the desktop helpers that snapcraft.yamls are using)

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Installed the patch as soon as it was announced. But I really did not see much difference on that day nor the following day. But since this weekend it seems to be doing well. Right now it is really snappy, maybe the updates afterwards are adding to that patch.

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So just to be explicitly clear, are the patches already in proposed? In other words, just ā€œUPGRADEā€ is good enoughā€¦

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yes! just upgrade and you will get the latest patches, no need to use proposed :slight_smile:

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Hm, I still have the issue, using 18.04 beta2 and after sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade 2 minutes ago:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/gzvThDUMV0uvcjFw2

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Ok some more refined info:

  • swarm animation (meta +a) does not produce any memory usage increase at all :+1:
  • neither does window spread (meta/activity button) :+1:
  • only alt+tab produces memory junk, like +0,1-0,5 MB per alt+tab :-1:
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I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 from 16.04 a few days ago and the first thing I noticed was the huge memory drain of the gnome-shell process. I need to reload the gnome-shell every half an hour or so. I found this page and while I was just about ready to install these packages I discovered that my gjs and libgjs packages were already at version 1.52.1-1ubuntu1, so these packages do not appear to fix anything.

My gnome-shell and other related gnome packages are at version 3.28.1. I read at Phoronix a couple of days ago that a new gnome-shell point version was released, 3.28.2, and that this fixes the memory leak issue.
Is that related in any way to the gjs packages above and, more importantly, will the new gnome-shell point release be backported to Ubuntu 18.04 so that we donā€™t have to use a PPA just for this right from the start?

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The changes mentioned in the original post in this thread are in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. No PPA is needed. There will likely be more fixes later.

The Phoronix article is a bit inaccurate because the GNOME 3.28.2 release notes were inaccurate.

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I use the most current version of 18.04. After login, when I open firefox and mailspring, and the memory is full, swap file is beeing heavily used. My computer, which has 4GB RAM and SSD is seemingly freeze and I have to wait minutes to work again. In the previous versions (less than 18.04) the situation was quite different. Will be there any solution, e.g. in first point release, or earlier?

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I had the same issues, Firefox is eating the memory, using chrome the same, I install xubuntu and the same issues, looks like 4GB of RAM is not enough for Ubuntu.

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I recently noticed that the used memory of the gnome-shell process is constantly decreasing up until 130mb or so.
Meaning ā€¦ Did some other fix landed that I missed?
For example if I use Peek (gtk app to record GIFs from the desktop) the used memory boosts up to 230mb but after closing the memory starts to lower. Very slowly but it IS decreasing.

Sorry for being late to the show, but did some advantanced fix hit 18.04 recently?
@vanvugt ?

(((Thank you you are really improving gnome shell )))

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Iā€™ve forgotten the details, but a quick check confirms the best fixes only exist in 18.10 right now.

In particular 18.04 is missing the main leak fixes that require gjs version 1.53.2 or later. That seems to be the only update weā€™re missing in bionic. The remaining fixes are already in 18.04ā€™s mutter.

Be careful what you wish for though. Recently I found that same ā€œmain leak fixā€ in gjs actually accounts for 30-50% of the CPU usage in some areas like the icon spring animation. I expect we will still release the fix to 18.04 but I am presently trying to find a workaround for that CPU penalty it introduces.

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