gnome-shell consumes several GB of RAM

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 (Linux 5.8.0-48-generic #54~20.04.1-Ubuntu) and today I find that gnome-shell is using LOTS OF RAM

 USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2365 gdm 20 0 14.7g 11.0g 10.8g S 0.0 35.1 143:54.82 gnome-shell 76510 youran 20 0 8937064 3.2g 3.0g S 0.0 10.2 123:57.14 gnome-shell

This server has 32GB of RAM but 21GB is used even there is no workload.

 total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem： 31Gi 21Gi 2.5Gi 1.8Gi 6.7Gi 7.1Gi

Notice that this server has been up for 123 days,

$ uptime 13:08:18 up 123 days, 22:54, 4 users, load average: 0.79, 1.19, 1.00

so I think there is some memory leak. I know a fresh restart can solve this problem. However, I want to know why, because Linux user should not always restart their computer. My gnome version is

$ gnome-shell --version
GNOME Shell 3.36.7

Related Questions:

• In Gnome-shell is taking a lot of ram, the accepted answer suggests disabling gnome extensions, but I do not have any enabled extension.

  $ gnome-extensions list
  desktop-icons@csoriano
  $ gnome-extensions list --enabled
  $ 

10

2 Answers

Memory leaks are a known problem (bug) of gnome-shell.

Three workarounds...

1. Use Wayland instead of X11/xorg. (Change on your login screen).

2. In X11/xorg, restart gnome-shell with ALT+F2, then "r", then ENTER.

3. Update to a newer version of Ubuntu.

To automate the workaround mentioned by @heynnema I created a cron job that runs every night.
Run crontab -e as your normal user and add the following line:

20 4 * * * DISPLAY=:1 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 dbus-send --type=method_call --print-reply --dest=org.gnome.Shell /org/gnome/Shell org.gnome.Shell.Eval string:'global.reexec_self()'

The same thing, but with a confirmation window using gnome-terminal in case I am up late and don't want to be interrupted:

20 4 * * * DISPLAY=:1 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 gnome-terminal --window -- /bin/bash -c "read -t 10 -p 'gnome-shell will be reloaded in ten seconds, HIT ENTER TO ABORT!' || dbus-send --type=method_call --print-reply --dest=org.gnome.Shell /org/gnome/Shell org.gnome.Shell.Eval string:'global.reexec_self()'"

Check what your current DISPLAY environment variable is and change the cron job if needed(echo $DISPLAY).
If your UID isn't 1000, modify XDG_RUNTIME_DIR with your UID(use the id command to get your UID).

With that, I pretty much never notice the memory leak(with 16GB RAM).

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