Thanks @vanvugt, this was helpful. I'm running ubuntu 23.10. It's been about a week since I rebooted and I noticed swap usage was quite high. I've got 32GB of RAM and am a developer with a bunch of stuff open at once. Decided to investigate. Closed everything, but left just gnome running and a terminal. Did a swapoff -a to clear swap and dropped caches to get it as close to just what was allocated as possible. It still showed 14GB of memory used with 5GB in cache. That seems high.
So, ran this to take a look at VmData for gnome-shell: cat /proc/$(pgrep -f /usr/bin/gnome-shell)/status | grep VmData That reveals: VmData: 1231000 kB That seems a bit excessive. Full disclosure. I do use extensions. It's too bare-bones without them. I miss being able to Alt-F2 -> R and reboot gnome, but it appears to not be possible now with Wayland. > It's important to remember that RSS increases is no indication of a leak - it > will rise and fall according to how busy the machine is and not how much new > memory the process has allocated. Please ignore all RSS values as they are > going to be unpredictable and misleading. > > As for VSZ, that's kind of related to potential leaks. The problem with VSZ > is that it's a measure of the address space mappings size and is also not a > measure of regular memory allocated by the process. Although you can use > changes in VSZ to detect leaks and bloat, address space used by VSZ is not an > indication of the memory requirements of the process. > > Probably a better field to monitor for actual leaks is VmData which you can > find in: > /proc/PID/status > > VmData is a more realistic indication of memory allocated by the process. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1672297 Title: gnome-shell uses lots of memory, and grows over time To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-shell/+bug/1672297/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
