Gnome 3.36.2 leaking in 20.04

[Omega]

I've noticed lately that the performance of the UI in Gnome 3.36.2 seems to decay with uptime.

The most obvious manifestation is that over time, window animations have a delay and feel "sticky". Applications themselves seem unaffected. When I tell gnome to switch workspaces, there's about a half second to full second delay before the animation happens. This also applies to things like pressing the meta key to show all my windows or pressing alt-tab. Each one appears to share the same delay.

I'm running a fairly unremarkable desktop setup using vanilla gnome on Ubuntu 20.04.

My research on this issue seems to indicate that there were memory leak issues in 18.xx versions of the OS, but that those were supposedly fixed. The only thing I can conclude at this point is that a new issue has emerged, there was a regression, or the original fix didn't work.

The animation delay is sapping productivity to the point that I eventually have to reboot my system. The gnome-shell process definitely leaks over time as it starts around ~300mb and if left for a day will sit at ~600mb or more.

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Regarding my overall hardware and nominal state of my system, I'm experiencing this issue even as I'm creating this question. I'm running the stock/vanilla gnome desktop, not the ubuntu customized one.

My system has 32gb of RAM, only 6gb of which are in use currently. My CPU usage fluctuates across 12 vcores up to 20% max. I have an RTX 2060 for my GPU.

At least as best as I can tell, I see no issue with the amount of resources gnome-shell is getting right now. 😉

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There also appear to be other accounts of this same issue building up since the release of 20.04. It's clear that this is a widespread issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/fxffcd/gnome_shell_336_in_ubuntu_2004_still_leaks/

I would treat this with some urgency as for regular users this bug renders the OS completely unusable.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: gnome-shell 3.36.2-1ubuntu1~20.04.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-33.37-generic 5.4.34
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-33-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.2
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Tue Jun 9 08:19:21 2020
DisplayManager: gdm3
InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-04-20 (50 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Beta amd64 (20200402)
RelatedPackageVersions: mutter-common 3.36.2-1ubuntu1~20.04.1
SourcePackage: gnome-shell
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thanks for the bug report.

You appear to have some non-standard extensions installed. Please remove them:

  '<email address hidden>',
  '<email address hidden>'

and then restart and retest.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I will also make this bug private while we diagnose it. General leak bug reports tend to attract spurious "me too" comments, so it should be private while we figure out the exact cause.

[Omega (atrauzzi)]

Disabled both extensions (only one was active at a time), still observing the problem.

It's interesting, but if I keep system monitor open and trigger window animations (meta key, switch desktops), memory usage jumps by a few MB every minute or two. And yes, this is with my weather extensions disabled.

Usage has not dropped after waiting a period of time either.

So I'm definitely able to trigger the leak simply by causing animations. Which is consistent with the fact that other people are reporting the exact same issue. On top of that, I can't possibly imagine that we're all running the same extensions...

I think this should be opened back up to the public, it doesn't seem ethical to try and prevent people from advocating about a problem.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

The attachment 'GsettingsChanges.txt' is showing two extensions were enabled, so please make sure they are both removed.

If the problem still happens then it sounds like it's already covered by bug 1856838.

[Omega (atrauzzi)]

I haven't been running any of the weather widgets for a while now and I had to do another reset of gnome just to get window animation speeds back to normal.

This issue is definitely present on a vanilla configuration.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I am starting to suspect (from other bug reports too) that systems with the Nvidia driver in particular degrade over time. That might be a graphics resource leak which would be Mutter's fault.