80% (512MB) of gnome-shell's memory mappings at start up are due to PulseAudio

[Daniel van Vugt]

80% (512MB) of gnome-shell's memory mappings at start-up are due to PulseAudio.

This seems excessive.

Memory profile from Google heap profiler attached.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Although this may not be a bug. It might just be reserved address space with very little physical memory impact.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Created attachment 138392
gnome-shell-all-mmaps-at-startup.pdf

80% (512MB) of gnome-shell's memory mappings at start-up are due to PulseAudio. This seems excessive.

Memory profile from Google heap profiler attached.

Although this may not be a bug. It might just be reserved address space with very little physical memory impact...?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Looks like maybe gnome-shell's use of libcanberra might be one of the triggers.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Also upstream:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/159

[Tanu Kaskinen (tanuk)]

Each "mempool" in pulseaudio is 64 MB by default, and there's one mempool per client. Maybe gnome-shell has multiple connections to pulseaudio? 8 connections sounds excessive, though... Maybe the server's own mempool is visible in the client memory mapping too, so perhaps two mempools per connection are visible in the client memory map. 4 connections sounds still a bit much, though.

The mempools should indeed not have full "physical" impact unless they're actually fully used.

What if you set "shm-size-bytes = 33554432" (i.e. 32 MB) in /etc/pulse/client.conf and /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and reboot? Does the gnome-shell memory usage go down by 256 MB?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Gitlab-migration (gitlab-migration)]

-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/issues/92.