gjs process (desktop-icons-ng extension) eats all available RAM and Freezes Computer

[Arden Goldberg]

Title sums it up. Just upgraded to 21.04 from 20.10, and gjs has now three times eaten all memory and frozen the everything solid.

Some sort of massive memory leak.

I caught a screenshot of it doing it, ticks up about 1/10th GB every few seconds until computer goes bye-bye.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 21.04
Package: gjs 1.67.2-2ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.11.0-16.17-generic 5.11.12
Uname: Linux 5.11.0-16-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu65
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sat May 1 19:22:11 2021
InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-05-07 (359 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Release amd64 (20200423)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gjs
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to hirsute on 2021-05-01 (0 days ago)

[Marco Trevisan (Treviño) (3v1n0)]

Do you have a reproducer for this?

[Arden Goldberg (blinkerfluidreservoir)]

I'm not quite certain what that means in this context, is a reproducer a script meant to recreate the conditions of the bug?

I have temporarily solved the issue by noting that it seemed to begin when the desktop was first drawn on screen, and running "sudo apt remove gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons-ng" and "sudo apt remove gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons". This is a bit inconvenient, but functional.

[Moshe Kaplan (moshekaplan)]

This issue appears to still be present on Ubuntu 23.04 x64 with package "gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons-ng 46+really47.0.2-3".

As the previous commenter wrote, uninstalling the extension fixed the memory leak:
$ sudo apt remove gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons-ng

[Sergio Costas (rastersoft-gmail)]

I can't reproduce this. My system has been on for a week, and this is how it shows:

[Sergio Costas (rastersoft-gmail)]

Do you have other extensions installed?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

It was only reported on lunar, so hopefully already fixed in mantic?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 23.04 (lunar) reached end-of-life on January 25, 2024.
Ubuntu 21.04 (hirsute) reached end-of-life on January 20, 2022.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it anymore. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test. If you then find the bug is still present in the newer Ubuntu version, please add a comment here telling us which new version it is in.