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Gnome-shell has memory leak.

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62chevy
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Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#1 Post by 62chevy »

I did ' apt-get upgrade ' today in my Sid install and gnome-shell shell was being held back. Looking at all the bugreports this bugreport stuck out.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=638437

After starting System Monitor Gnome Shell was using 79.5 MB and after doing Alt+ F2 r memory went down to 74.5 MB. Watching System Monitor for a couple of minutes you could watch gnome-shell increase in memory size. After surfing the web for about an hour memory usage for at 179.4 MB and restarting the shell brought it back down to 75 MB.

This isn't good. :evil:
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#2 Post by craigevil »

Its Gnome, running like crap is normal.

The only good gnome is the travelocity gnome.

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vbrummond
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#3 Post by vbrummond »

That is much better than how it used to be. It is a known leaker I am not sure why.
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62chevy
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#4 Post by 62chevy »

vbrummond wrote:That is much better than how it used to be. It is a known leaker I am not sure why.

Guess I need to read bugreports more often as this has been around since day one. Unless this bug is fixed Xfce4 will be the desktop of choice in Wheezy then.
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vbrummond
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#5 Post by vbrummond »

Well my experience of it is back in the old days pre-release and even the 3.0 release; I had it grow in memory usage until it hit a certain cap; Such as 600mb. Now as of 3.2 the shell stays fairly trim in memory usage never really growing over 160mb. Some growing is to be expected due to the nature of the program. That is how memory management works.

Gnome Shell launches; It uses the memory it requires to start and paint the basic gui. As you load more extensions the memory usage will grow. If you open more windows the location and etc of the windows will have to be tracked. A big killer would be the menu replacement screen on the dash that loads a few dozen large icons.

Now what is a memory leak? When the memory we gather like so is not given back correctly. Though it would make a lot of sense to cache all of this memory if we are able to. So the program never has to do future relocations or page faults to reclaim the same data. This is probably what you are experiencing. The question is; At need will this memory be reclaimed for use in other applications?
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62chevy
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#6 Post by 62chevy »

That does give me some food for thought so may need to do some more testing. I have noticed when Gnome 3 first starts the menus are a bit slow but after the first time then they are right there so maybe it is caching that kind of stuff.
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vbrummond
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#7 Post by vbrummond »

Do not get me wrong, It may really be leaking. Just we can not rule out it is just behaving correctly using all the free ram to improve the responsiveness of the interface.
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62chevy
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#8 Post by 62chevy »

I understand what you are saying and all my testing will be by the seat of my pants but as long as it doesn't get out of control. 200 to 600 MB may be okay on my computer with 16 gig of RAM but not on one with 2 or less.
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#9 Post by www »

vbrummond wrote:Do not get me wrong, It may really be leaking. Just we can not rule out it is just behaving correctly using all the free ram to improve the responsiveness of the interface.
While testing ,

I've noticed memory usage to be less erratic upon starting an x environment

This was after disabling swap and changing I/O scheduler to noop

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62chevy
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#10 Post by 62chevy »

www wrote:
vbrummond wrote:Do not get me wrong, It may really be leaking. Just we can not rule out it is just behaving correctly using all the free ram to improve the responsiveness of the interface.
While testing ,

I've noticed memory usage to be less erratic upon starting an x environment

This was after disabling swap and changing I/O scheduler to noop

sent via mobile ..

I never had swap enabled and have noticed that gnome-shell never gets over 250 MiB and will actually lose size when a program is closed. Closing gnome-terminal after updates and general fiddling around the shell lost just over 30 MiB. About 3 MiB when closing Iceweasel.
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dimedrol
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Re: Gnome-shell has memory leak.

#11 Post by dimedrol »

I seen gnome memory usage 1700mb and more.
I turn off my computer rarely. But because of gnome memory leak i have periodically do logout and login to free memory.

$ cat /etc/debian_version
7.0

Versions:
gnome-shell 3.4.2-7 amd64
gnome 1:3.4+7 amd64


top - 20:54:29 up 78 days, 6:51, 30 users, load average: 0.17, 0.46, 0.55
Tasks: 325 total, 1 running, 323 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu(s): 8.9 us, 6.4 sy, 0.0 ni, 84.0 id, 0.6 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 8090712 total, 7549304 used, 541408 free, 33620 buffers
KiB Swap: 0 total, 0 used, 0 free, 3082636 cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6240 igor 20 0 2783m 1.7g 13m S 2.5 22.4 2771:50 gnome-shell
14843 igor 20 0 1166m 242m 10m S 0.0 3.1 717:01.34 firefox-bin
8082 igor 20 0 812m 210m 15m S 3.1 2.7 5:24.42 python
13905 igor 20 0 878m 190m 44m S 0.6 2.4 1:00.90 chrome
14095 igor 20 0 673m 112m 21m S 0.0 1.4 0:02.17 chrome
13982 igor 20 0 967m 108m 24m S 0.0 1.4 0:24.17 chrome
14065 igor 20 0 1072m 84m 14m S 0.6 1.1 0:19.62 chrome
14223 igor 20 0 926m 77m 21m S 0.0 1.0 0:03.57 chrome
14477 igor 20 0 922m 65m 22m S 0.0 0.8 0:05.96 chrome
14550 igor 20 0 910m 64m 20m S 0.0 0.8 0:13.05 chrome
14410 igor 20 0 903m 59m 21m S 0.0 0.8 0:01.21 chrome
14420 igor 20 0 901m 57m 21m S 0.0 0.7 0:00.98 chrome
3725 mysql 20 0 514m 56m 2388 S 0.0 0.7 1939:11 mysqld
30792 mldonkey 20 0 127m 54m 3436 S 0.6 0.7 688:16.29 mlnet
13967 igor 20 0 905m 53m 20m S 0.6 0.7 0:04.00 chrome
18551 igor 20 0 905m 51m 21m S 0.0 0.7 0:08.61 chrome
6404 igor 20 0 453m 51m 5268 S 0.6 0.7 148:04.00 gnome-terminal

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