gnome-shell occupies a lot of RAM and blocks system when deleting files in Nautilus

[Kay-Ro]

sometimes the system uses 11GB of 16GB ram for 10+ gnome-shell processes.
It seemingly occurs as soon as deleting files via the file manager. It occurred for me when trying to delete 500 files with a total of 700mb but also when just deleting 200 files totaling around 75mb.
A suggested solution to try
  gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock show-trash false
(bug 1876641, mentioned to me in bug 1962357) did not resolve the issue.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: gnome-shell 3.36.9-0ubuntu0.20.04.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-100.113-generic 5.4.166
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-100-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.21
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Tue Mar 1 10:52:52 2022
DisplayManager: gdm3
InstallationDate: Installed on 2021-06-02 (271 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 20.04.1 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Release amd64 (20200731)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
RelatedPackageVersions: mutter-common 3.36.9-0ubuntu0.20.04.2
SourcePackage: gnome-shell
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Kay-Ro (kayro-d)]

attached you can find a screenshot of htop after deleting multiple files. The ram usage does not seem to be dependent of the files deleted (no apparent difference between deleting 200 files totaling 75mb and 500 files totaling 700mb)
In this instance there were almost 40 processes of the gnome-shell
running "alt+f2" "r" cleared the used ram but did not reduce the number of gnome-shell processes.

update: deleting the files via terminal does not lead to the same complication of unreasonable ram usage.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thanks for the bug report. Yes this did sound a lot like bug 1876641 when you mentioned it yesterday and I even installed 20.04 and verified that "show-trash false" fixed it for me.

I did however find that Ubuntu 22.04 has a lesser form of the issue where gnome-shell/ubuntu-dock will suddenly spike in memory usage by many megabytes when deleting files from Nautilus, and then mostly free the memory again 10 seconds later. I was planning on investigating that more.

For the moment I will assume this issue is still just the ubuntu-dock extension.