Bug#766595: Gnome-shell leaks memory

[Mike Hommey]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 05:54:28PM +0900, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 11:28:48PM +0200, fmneto at gmail.com wrote:
> > I have news regarding this bug (or at least I believe this is the same
> > bug).
> > 
> > GNOME devs have found a "memory leak" in gnome-shell's garbage
> > collection, when related to GJS. They have merged the fix into the
> > development branch (GNOME 3.30) and are going to (probably) merge into
> > the 3.28 version as well.
> > 
> > https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-memory-leak/
> 
> Until very recently, this was kind of bearable. But recently, it because
> way worse. I rebooted my machine 2 days ago, when gnome-shell was
> sucking close to 10GB memory. It's been 2 days, and it's already sucking
> 4GB. That's with version 3.30.1-2.

I got a "nice" way to accelerate the process, although I don't know if
it's the same root cause: take a screencast (ctrl+alt+shift+R). After a
few seconds, gnome-shell memory usage explodes, then terminate the
screencast with the same keyboard shortcut, at which point gnome-shell
sucks CPU for a while and releases memory... but does not get back to
the level it was before you started. After a few screencasts, it got
from ~2G of memory usage to ~4G.

Mike