[BUG REPORT] - significant memory leak in v275.09.07 with gnome-shell

[darksky]

Bug: On my system, gnome-shell clearly "leaks" memory at a rate of ~2 MB/min...

Supporting data: I ran the following script upon logging in to Gnome, running from another tty (ALT+CTRL+F1) then came back to my graphical X running on tty8 and just let the mouse sit there idle. I stopped collecting data after 45 min as you can see in the graphic.



Here is the script I wrote to simply makes two columns in a logfile, one for gnome-shell's mem RSS and the second for a simple time stamp.

#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..6000}; do
    number=$(ps -A --sort -rss -o comm,rss | head -n 3 | grep gnome-shell | awk '{ print $2 }')
    correct=$(echo "scale=2;$number/1024" | bc)
    echo "$correct $i" >> /dev/shm/mem_usage.txt 
    sleep 60s
done

[alexmurray]

Why do you think this is a bug in the nvidia drivers and not just a bug in gnome shell?

[darksky]

@alex - the leak is notedly faster with the nvidia drivers; open source nouveau leaks at a much slower rate. Do you have gnome-shell on your system?

[alexmurray]

If there is a memory leak for both drivers (regardless of which is a faster leak) I would definitely say to look at gnome-shell as the culprit first before the driver.

[siddly]

I am seeing memory leaks on 2 boxes NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-275.09.07 and NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-280.04, but it may have been there with earlier 275.09 versions.

[hwertz]

One of my gentoo boxes uses KDE4, and also sees leaks with this version and XOrg 1.10.4. This is on a Geforce 6600 GT. (Specifically I am now running KDE 4.7.1, although it has done it for a while.) I haven't quantified the leak rate, but my system has 1GB of RAM, Athlon 64 3800+ but running 32-bit Gentoo (since I previously had an Athlon XP 1800+ and just moved the hard disk over wholesale.) After a matter of days (a week at the outset) X will be using well over 1GB of RAM (most will swap out, the amoutn swapped in and active will be like 40-80MB if I'm not doing much, maybe a few hundred MB if I have a bunch of firefox tabs open.) I could of course just try a newer driver -- portage has 275.28, 280.13 and 285.03.

Find attached an nvidia bug report. I notice it attached an nvidia driver install log from like 2007, but believe me that's not close to current