gnome-shell uses lots of memory

[NoOne]

On Ubuntu 17.10 (daily build, VirtualBox), gnome-shell uses lots of memory, even more after opening and closing just a few apps (LibreOffice Writer, Chromium, Nautilus.) More than 640 mb.

Also,the CPU usage is quite high too, even if nothing is running in the foreground.

See screen captures.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[NoOne (1noname)]

While it is true that Gnome is the desktop that uses the most RAM, I've never seen gnome-shell use that much RAM or CPU in any Linux distribution.

Just to make you think a bit, System76 decided to change their GTK theme based on Adapta because they noticed it was causing high memory usage. Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu and it takes less RAM...

I have tried many Gnome distros, Fedora, Manjaro, OpenSuse, and none took that much RAM. And that's not talking about CPU usage.

So, please, take the time to review this before shoveling the problem to upstream.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Well, none of the distribution you have been using had GNOME 3.26 either which is brand new.

gnome-shell uses 236M here on my uptodate artful amd64 installation with a session which has been open for a day and cpu usage is low

in summary, right the situation is not normal and would deserve some debugging, it could come from your configuration (do you use some extension?) or be a bug (likely upstream since we have little modifications to the shell). Do you see the same issue under a GNOME session rather than an Ubuntu one? Do you have it if you switch to Adwaita?

[NoOne (1noname)]

It was on a fresh install in Virtual Box, with only Open Weather as extension, on the Ubuntu session, nothing else.

That said, I tried earlier Ubuntu 17.10, but with the Pop!_OS PPA. And it was taking less RAM.

[Ads20000 (ads20000)]

1LinuxGuy what do you think it is that's causing Ubuntu's distribution of GNOME Shell to take up more RAM/CPU? What change in the Pop!_OS PPA do you think is making it work better for them? The different GTK theme? As Sebastien Bacher says, do you get the same bug on Ubuntu's vanilla GNOME session (use `sudo apt install gnome-session` then log into the session since that uses Adwaita instead of Ambiance/Radiance?).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Please disable that extension and restart your computer and see if your memory usage is better.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Without stack traces from a memory profiler, or confirmation that your problem is caused by a specific extension or feature, we unfortunately can't do anything and need to group this bug with similar bug reports...

[Charles Green (chick)]

I'd be willing to do memory profiling - I don't know how, and would need some assistance in getting it done. I have noticed that if gnome-shell is running for a couple of days, I run up towards 400 MB of memory used, and the system starts to feel sluggish. Logging out and back in, or restarting the gnome-shell reduce RAM usage to 67 MB, and restore system performance.