System not freeing up memory/Programs continually using up more and more memory

General system Newbie
21

My memory looks like this! :laughing:

Screenshot_20200916_115133

2 Likes
22

I found the culprit. For whatever dumb ****** reason, Firefox was causing Plasma Shell, itself, and two other programs to eat up more and more memory until it hit swap for whatever reason. I switched browsers to Vivaldi and my memory usage is completely normal now. Iā€™m glad that thatā€™s solved and over with, but itā€™s a real shame that I have to stop using Firefox, as I really liked it :confused:.

3 Likes
23

Firefox, at present, opens a new process for each tab that you open, therefore more memory gets used. I think Chromium does the same thing, Iā€™m not sure. What is the CPU of the computer you are using? I had similar problems using KDE on Manjaro but switching to XFCE made things a whole lot better. I had 8GB of memory on the system but the CPU just dinā€™t handle KDE very well. It was an old Core 2 Duo. Running KDE on a newer Core i5 solved the issue. Firefox is OK now.

24

Firefox froze my entire system this evening and I had to switch to tty and kill it . I was only deleting history :man_shrugging:

25

You can limit the number of processes Firefox uses by setting dom.ipc.ProcessCount in about:config.
However Iā€™m not sure how this affects memory usage.

26

I run Firefox exclusively on all my desktops and never run across an issue with it. :thinking:

27

Me neither. Could be a plugin maybe?

28

I have a 2700x. And itā€™s not that itā€™s opening a new process for every tab that Iā€™m talking about, because I know that, but itā€™s the fact that it continues to use more and more memory despite me not using it 24/7.

Also, Plasma Shell is starting to creep up with memory again. Ugh. Granted, itā€™s not creeping up as much, but itā€™s still getting larger and larger. Even a fresh install couldnā€™t fix this issue.

29

The Plasma Integration add-on gave me some headache a while ago. The CPU was running at max and everything jammed. Disabling it solved the issue. I havenā€™t tried it since then.

30

Have you tried starting with a new Firefox profile, esp. without any extensions? Same goes for plasma, growing memory usually points to a misbehaving widget.

1 Like
31

Yeah, disable Firefox plugins and perhaps some of the Plasma stuff too. I canā€™t tell you what about the Plasma stuff because it comes down to what you have installed.

32

Removing the plasma add-on was one of the first things I tried.

2 Likes
33

Think it does boil down to widgets, though. I removed some and now itā€™s decreasing. Thanks for the suggestion!

2 Likes
34

Some widgets are great and others seem really dodgy sometimes. Iā€™ve had mixed luck with them. Some of them are old leftovers from KDE4 and donā€™t play so nicely. Hope things get better! :smile:

35

Thank you! Itā€™s a shame though, the stock resource monitoring widget was convenient to have. Oh well!

36

Yeah, a few things have become lost along the way. As you say: ā€œOh well!ā€. Iā€™m sure we can find other resources.

37

I thoroughly thought it worked for a couple of minutes, but then I saw it didnā€™t. Darn. It still gradually rises up in memory usage, but itā€™s wayyy slower now. However, programs do not free up memory.

Iā€™m at wits end right now. I have tried so many things, and alot of things people have suggested. My system seems to never free up memory, which causes my memory usage to gradually crawl up. For example, if I get a desktop notification, my Plasma Shell will jump up in usage by 3-10MiB in usage, or if I tab into Discord and use it for a little bit, itā€™ll jump up by 20-30MiB. This wouldnā€™t be a problem, except it NEVER goes down. Within 3-4 days, my idle memory use will be >50%, excluding disk cache.

This is an issue, because I frequently play games and use virtual machines on my computer, which causes memory to overflow to Swap and bog down my compter. Iā€™ll list things I have tried to fix this, italicizing solutions that have slightly helped, and bolding ones that have helped a little more.

  1. Removing the plasma integration addon
  2. Reinstalling EndeavourOS
  3. Changing browsers from Firefox
  4. Removing resource management widgets
  5. Switching system fonts and themes.
  6. Shutting down, then rebooting my PC.

Iā€™ll also list some other symptoms my PC has been having. I will bold ones that are more severe in nature.

  1. Booting from a liveUSB freezes my entire PC within a couple of minutes, regardless if it a EndevOS usb or a debian based one.
  1. Like I mentioned, memory usage only goes up and never goes down. This means that just by opening some programs, then letting my PC idle for a while increases memory usage. The furthest I have let it go up to was 5.5GiB idle.
  1. Text in widgets either distort or disappear. Iā€™m not too good at describing things, so Iā€™ll just give an example:
    For example:
    Normal text: Write 0KiB/s
    Distorted text: Wrā€¦0KiB/s
    Text that has disappeared: 0KiB/s
  1. Using heaptrack, my computer is making a ginormous amount of allocations and temporary calls.
  1. Valgrind reports a tiny amount of leaked memory.

System specs:
RX 5700 XT
Ryzen 2700X
16GB of RAM

This is extremely frustrating for me.

38

Probably not Firefox itself at fault:

1 Like
39

You are correct, I just updated the thread.

40

This could well be a memory leak in a driver. :thinking:

This would provide a good point for diagnosis if you can reliably replicate the issue. This means you can try swapping out hardware to try and narrow it down.