Cinnamon 2.4 / 17.1RC memory behaviour

[brownsr]

The Cinnamon process is growing in memory use over time. Here are some initial memory observations for this process. The measurements below are done using a simple readout from the supplied system monitor. The desktop has been stripped down to a minimum to remove potential causes - a static background, no startup apps at all, no 3rd party applets, but I will admit to a custom theme ;-) There was no connectivity - no physical connections, no bluetooth applet, and wifi turned off in the computer by a hardware switch. I did not touch the keyboard at all in the first set of measurements other than to launch the monitor, so there were no external events that should have been affecting Cinnamon at all. Memory measurements in MB

startup 73.3 (I launched the monitor by hand as quickly as I could after startup) rising to 83.5 2 or 3 seconds later 84.6 +53 seconds 84.7 +40 secs more From this point on I just recorded the running time 84.8 1:30 84.9 2:06 85 2:27 85.1 3:16 85.2 3:50 85.3 4:15 85.4 4:37 86.5 5:15 86.6 5:30

at this point I turned the hardware wireless switch on memory rose from 86.6 to 94.8 immediately then I recorded 98.4 and 101.6 in the first 10 secs after turning the switch on further readings of 101.6, 101.7, 102.4 in the next 10 secs stabilising at about 105.1

at this point I turned the hardware wireless switch off, memory remained stable at 105.1, so the memory used in the wireless connection setup was not returned

I turned on the update manager. This was the first time I had touched the keyboard after launching the monitor. Memory rose from 105.6 to 106.7, and fell back again to 105.6 after around 20 seconds. (No searching for updates etc., just launch of the program.)

At this point I realised that although I had turned off the bluetooth app, I had not actually turned bluetooth off. I turned bluetooth off and rebooted and took another series of measurements:

startup 73.8 quickly rising to 85 after 2-3 secs or so 85.1 1:59 85.2 2:32 85.2 3:07 85.3 3:30 85.4 4:06 85.5 4:48 86.5 4:54 86.6 5:27

So tentatively it would appear that there is something kicking in shortly after the desktop displays that is eating up 11-12 MB, a slow and gradual increase of around 1-200K per minute without any obvious event based cause, something kicking in around 5min or so that uses up about 1MB, and then there is an event based use of around 20MB when initiating a subsequent wireless connection that does not come back when closing the connection. Bluetooth being turned on did not have any obvious effect. Launch of the update manager did not have any obvious effect.

[mtwebster]

I've observed this as well - if you wish, you can use this applet as well: https://github.com/mtwebster/Cinnamonitor - it allows you to monitor the memory of any process name (defaults to cinnamon)

[brownsr]

Thanks, I'll add that to the armoury :-)

[ghost]

Thats intresting... I do more less the same: https://github.com/lestcape/Garbage-Collector

Now i don't see the first problem, but what i note is more less this, but when some application requires a big memory not always it's returned...

The problem that i note it reported here: https://github.com/linuxmint/cjs/issues/15

The solution of gnome shell devs: https://github.com/linuxmint/cjs/pull/17

I confirm this with more people, but some of them only speak spanish.

[ghost]

The most hard thing will be for example: In the applets settings, add cinnamon menu, then remove cinnamon menu, then add cinnamon menu... do this procedure several time and you will see what happens...

[brownsr]

As of today, observed on nightly build packages, the steady leak of 100K+ per minute cannot be observed. I have not been checking over the last few days, so can't identify exactly what change might have solved this and exactly when, but it is good not to see it there any more.

[NeoGeo64]

I'm having this memory leak issue too. I'm on Mint 17.1 and I'm serious about to give up on this distro.

Here is my post about it in the LInux Mint forums (as if it would help) http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=186593

[ghost]

@NeoGeo64 no one force you to use Mint, but any way, Mint not have any memory issue. What occurs it's relate with Cinnamon, not with Mint and on my opinion, what is wrong it's the cjs implemetation of the garbage collector. This is not a memory leak, is a wrong implementation of the garbage collector, as you can see here: https://github.com/linuxmint/cjs/pull/17

My current stage right now, about 3 hours after of the session init:

[NeoGeo64]

I use Mint because I love the distro. I've been dealing with all sorts of issues in the Linux world in the last few months. Garbage collector, you say?

[ghost]

The problem on my opinion is the garbage collector. Cinnamon can have memory leaks, but not on the commonds procedures. Use this applet: https://github.com/lestcape/Garbage-Collector and reduce the maximun value of memory to 10, then restart cinnamon and see if you note after some time a problem with the memory. If you can not note this, is the garbage collector issue, not a memory leak. If you want to know about garbage collector: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_%28computer_science%29

[NeoGeo64]

Thanks for your reply!

I'll download the applet and check that out. Maybe it is time Cinnamon got a patch? I just can't stand KDE or Unity or GNOME3. Cinnamon has a normal desktop, a classic menu, task bar and system tray. Do we need anything else? No, we don't!

I have rebooted my system and it has gone from 60MB used by Cinnamon at boot to 222.6MB at approximately 3 hours uptime. I had attained almost 5 days of uptime and it was using around 400MB.

I have heard reports of users getting way worse leaks (1-5GB!). I seem to have a leak, but mine is much slower. I believe it [Cinnamon] would eventually eat it's way up to 5GB but I think it would take longer than what other users are reporting (matter of hours, days time for them for Cinnamon to eat through RAM).

Maybe their configuration is different? Maybe they have Cinnamon altered in some way? My Mint install is still pretty default. I haven't changed the theme or anything yet. I kind of like the way it came. Easy to use and everything, Cinnamon/Mint is.

[mtwebster]

Do you have any extra applets, desklets or extensions that you downloaded from spices? If you do, could you try disabling them temporarily, and observe any differences.

Could you describe your usage patterns?

• Do you alt-tab alot? If so, which switcher type?
• Do you use expo or scale/overview frequently?
• Do you use the mouse or keyboard shortcuts primarily for this stuff?
• Lot of video watching?
• Happens only after a suspend, etc... ... and so on, feel free to be as verbose as possible.

Unfortunately, some issues, such as this one, are not easily nailed down. My cinnamon memory never tips 200mb, even after a few days. My use patterns are different than yours, however, and it could be some portion of the code - that I never invoke as a user, but you do - that's causing this.

[ghost]

@mtwebster I don't know why, but you can read here that delete the profile and then create a new one could solve some memory problems. A configuration problem? The memory will lost when an error occurs and more applets to evaluate could cause more problems, also if there are not loaded? http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=183250&sid=255f274e0dd621847e777358e2560c46

[JosephMcc]

I am with @mtwebster on this. Something specific has to be causing the issue you guys are having. I have at times left my machine running for a week at a time without seeing memory usage like what's being reported.

Quick case in point, I did a little experiment over the last couple hours. I started by restarting Cinnamon from the panel context menu. Like normal, memory usage started very low and then increased over about the first minute until it steadied at around 125mb. I used the trick of opening and closing the Cinnamon menu over and over to drive the memory usage up to around 170mb. I then closed all open windows except Hexchat and left the machine alone. I have things set so the lock screen kicks on and the monitors shut off after 10 minutes. I came back after after about 2 hours and Cinnamon's memory usage was at 122mb. Even now with Firefox and System Monitor also open I am sitting right around 128mb.

The only 3rd party applets I have installed are the weather applet, mtwebsters Cinnamon/Gjs monitor applet, and the multi-monitor window list applet. Running dalcde's panel rewok branch and a background slideshow. I don't normally make heavy use of the Cinnamon menu since I almost always use the same few apps. I have them readily available in the panel launchers applet. Also not a big alt-tab or multi-workspace user though I do use them on occasion.

[ghost]

@JosephMcc thanks, thats interesting... But i reproduce the problem some time ago with the default cinnamon configuration... Some thing could create a problem and then we cannot go back, because we not know why this occurs. On my case, i have a big problem, thats is related with gc. If i have a memory leaks, then my applet(https://github.com/lestcape/Garbage-Collector) can not fix the leaks, but when my applet is working, this problem not occurs. So, a gc problem can not be caused by any external code of cinnamon. This means, that if other applets have a memory leak or not, not matter because is a cinnamon problem. And i also downloaded the cjs code and then compare with the gjs code. Cinnamon forks the gjs code before the gnome shell devs apply the path that is added here: https://github.com/linuxmint/cjs/pull/17

This code is not my code, could you explain why gnome shell devs merge this code if is not needed? I can not explain why. So, need to be something there, that only occurs on some specific configuration...

Any way, on different systems with the same configuration, you can not expected that the same problem occurs, if you add some different configuration to the problem less.

I talking here of a problem that not occurs to all users, only a few, so your experience to the problem, really is not representative if you don' t have the problem. Your help, ofcourse is wellcome, but only say that this problem not occurs to you is not a help.

Edit: Also if i merge the gnome shell code(and compile and install cjs code), then my problem not occurs. And yes with the same configuration of Cinnamon. So, i can not infer that is causing by an external extension.

[ghost]

I lost 1 Gb on 6 hours, please compare with the image above.

[JosephMcc]

@lestcape I'm not disputing that cjs might be improved by the updates from upstream gjs nor will I pretend like I understand the inner workings of cjs/gjs. It would be nice though to try and get to the bottom of what is causing the issue in the first place since some users experience it and others don't. I posted what I'm seeing to maybe get some sort of comparison to what others are doing and see if we can possibly narrow down the cause. I think that was the point of mtwebsters post.

What I do know is that people posting a bunch of screenshots of Cinnamon using outrageous amounts of memory or telling us how they're about to leave Mint/Cinnamon because of it doesn't help anything.

[ghost]

@JosephMcc i see now your point... sorry.

[JosephMcc]

I stumbled on another thing that could be of interest. Check this: https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/commit/9548cd834156447ef8a36a038f0b48eb8992fa8b#diff-09304ba2858e4c3eefca50fd13f45308R564

And a relevant discussion here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685513 It's a long thread but shows how difficult the cause of this sort of thing can be to nail down.

[ghost]

@JosephMcc thanks, I never would had thought-out on use the valgrind on cjs, even if i use it on qtCreator.

Now i need to know how no one detected the problem before, if clear there are several. I think that the problem it's still there and we can not discover it because ours normal behavior avoid to test the real cause. Please try to destroy the cairo context on an explicit way. Please, if we don't understand the gjs code, do not expect to merge code that solves memory problems or performance. Do that right now. This is only what i can conclude.

[mtwebster]

If you had found that patch a couple weeks sooner I probably would have merged it before 2.4, but being so close to a release it wasn't worth the risk in our opinion, when it wasn't really a widespread problem. Whether we understand it all or not is irrelevant - do you realize how many times gjs (and other gnome-shell stuff) has had things implemented, re-implemented, reverted, etc... it's never been a static thing.

There's just as much risk in applying the very latest upstream patches applied as there is just leaving it alone sometimes. Unfortunately that means occasionally some users have problematic experiences. So we try to work them out and address them. But if we waited until every single user had a perfectly bug-free experience we'd never do a release!

[ghost]

@mtwebster thats it's also a good point but it's a little problematic to me be on your place... Because possible i need to decide the same as you decided, but maybe not. As you see some latest changes create also specific problems. They are made to fix problems, like this change. What could be more important, is really relative to the people. What i don't understand now is, why we need to ask for the cause of the problem? The cause is know. Is interesting see the user report the same thing, one time and another? Of Course that a normal user can not discover the cause of a problem like that. This a time lost for all.

[mtwebster]

Yes it's interesting to see the users report the same things, because hopefully one of them provides something useful that can guide us to fixing it. 10 people reporting they have memory issues does nothing to help me, particularly if I am not witnessing the same behavior, unless they can provide me with details that will help reproduce it.

I'm not going to blindly add patches without at least attempting to study the ramifications, and the potential for new regressions - I don't care where it comes from - and especially 2 weeks before a release. What's even more fun, is that the debian maintainers want to run Cinnamon off of upstream gjs. They'll have the latest language bindings (3.14+ versus 3.10), but they'll also have bugs manifest themselves that we'll have no idea how to handle or where they came from. We'll have subtly different versions of Cinnamon floating around and behaving differently. So not only will we have our own self-created bugs and regressions, we'll also have new mystery bugs to deal with, with users pissed off at us for things we have nothing to do with.

[ghost]

Well... if good to know that we don't lost the time then. The debian decision is not a good news... Could not be possible create a wrapper to handle 3.14 as a dependency of 3.10 and then apply the patch just in a separate code without affect the stable cinnamon? This will be a preamble to the new code that can be added later or not and could be development with the help of debian devs... This was my idea of create a wrapper of the St and the different code to start cinnamon over gnome shell and automatically migrate the applets, desklets... I can not continues this project, because the updates come more faster than what i can development the wrapper...

[NeoGeo64]

Opening and closing the Menu, you mean the "Start" button ? I tried opening and closing that Menu over and over again and it never decreased memory for me. Also, when I try to restart Cinnamon it just never comes back. So I'm stuck with whatever desktop icons I have and whatever windows I have open. I don't have buttons on top of the windows to maximize, close, etc. Just the window itself. Thank God I had a terminal window open so I could reboot gracefully because without it there was no other way except holding down the power button. On 01/06/2015 01:44 AM, JosephMcc wrote:

I am with @mtwebster https://github.com/mtwebster on this. Something specific has to be causing the issue you guys are having. I have at times left my machine running for a week at a time without seeing memory usage like what's being reported.

Quick case in point, I did a little experiment over the last couple hours. I started by restarting Cinnamon from the panel context menu. Like normal, memory usage started very low and then increased over about the first minute until it steadied at around 125mb. I used the trick of opening and closing the Cinnamon menu over and over to drive the memory usage up to around 170mb. I then closed all open windows except Hexchat and left the machine alone. I have things set so the lock screen kicks on and the monitors shut off after 10 minutes. I came back after after about 2 hours and Cinnamon's memory usage was at 122mb. Even now with Firefox and System Monitor also open I am sitting right around 128mb.

The only 3rd party applets I have installed are the weather applet, mtwebsters Cinnamon/Gjs monitor applet, and the multi-monitor window list applet. Running dalcde's panel rewok branch and a background slideshow. I don't normally make heavy use of the Cinnamon menu since I almost always use the same few apps. I have them readily available in the panel launchers applet. Also not a big alt-tab or multi-workspace user though I do use them on occasion.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3690#issuecomment-68832100.

[NeoGeo64]

OK, yeah, my memory leak is nowhere near that bad. Mine goes up about 100MB every day. But, you see, that's still bad because after a couple of weeks it's using up all of my RAM. I can understand the Cinnamon process using more and less RAM as it's needed but for it to just continue to consume memory. Cinnamon needs to go on a diet, so to speak. haha On 01/06/2015 03:20 AM, Lester Carballo Pérez wrote:

I lost 1 Gb on 6 hours, please compare with the image above. captura de pantalla de 2015-01-06 02 17 25 https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1389572/5625971/3962e0ea-954a-11e4-9c76-1de7d4a4a144.png

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3690#issuecomment-68837953.

[NeoGeo64]

You have to understand, though. A lot of us are Windows converts and get frustrated when things break in the OS that the average user can't fix with a few clicks (or commands). On 01/06/2015 04:24 AM, JosephMcc wrote:

@lestcape https://github.com/lestcape I'm not disputing that cjs might be improved by the updates from upstream gjs nor will I pretend like I understand the inner workings of cjs/gjs. It would be nice though to try and get to the bottom of what is causing the issue in the first place since some users experience it and others don't. I posted what I'm seeing to maybe get some sort of comparison to what others are doing and see if we can possibly narrow down the cause. I think that was the point of mtwebsters post.

What I do know is that people posting a bunch of screenshots of Cinnamon using outrageous amounts of memory or telling us how they're about to leave Mint/Cinnamon because of it doesn't help anything.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3690#issuecomment-68843140.

[NeoGeo64]

Bugs are inevitable in something as complex as a Linux distro. You guys do a fine job of releasing a distro into the world that's easy to pick up and use. On 01/06/2015 06:59 AM, Michael Webster wrote:

If you had found that patch a couple weeks sooner I probably would have merged it /before/ 2.4, but being so close to a release it wasn't worth the risk in our opinion, when it wasn't really a widespread problem. Whether we understand it all or not is irrelevant - do you realize how many times gjs (and other gnome-shell stuff) has had things implemented, re-implemented, reverted, etc... it's never been a static thing.

There's just as much risk in applying the very latest upstream patches applied as there is just leaving it alone sometimes. Unfortunately that means occasionally some users have problematic experiences. So we try to work them out and address them. But if we waited until /every single user had a perfectly bug-free experience/ we'd never do a release!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3690#issuecomment-68857113.

[brownsr]

NeoGeo64. Just to clarify, are you saying that alt-F2 r to restart cinnamon does not bring back the memory in the cinnamon process ? It certainly does for me.

[ghost]

I hope that can be understand, that I not try to solve a personal problem, I only try to help other on the same situation than me. I have the knowledge and the necessary resources (launchpad) to solve my own problems, also those of a group of users of cinnamon (the ubuntu 14.04). I understand why the change is not produced, so i not want to create more different branches of cinnamon with the corresponding associate problems that this could be create. My only intention is helping, but i don't had known about the complete scenario, so i need to ask. Any way thank for the explanation.

[ghost]

@NeoGeo64 try to open and closed the menu(start button), not decrease the memory, occurs the opposite in this case, because popup menu have a cairo context, to create a beautiful popup menu(with an arrow). And the cairo context is not currently destroyed on an explicit way.

[tyler71]

Cinnamon 2.4.6 Opening & closing windows causing a steady increase in memory usage per #2986 I restarted cinnamon after reaching 600mb and it dropped back to 107mb (slightly modified script)

while true; do timeout 1 xeyes; done

[rickyzhang82]

I experienced this in Fedora 21- cinnamon-2.4.6-2.fc21.x86_64. The process cinnamon takes up 2-3GB memory over one week time and slow down desktop.

I have to manually kill the process and restart it.This seems to be a memory leak.

[vpal]

Same issue here on Linux Mint 17.1, got to about 500MB in a few hours. I'm new to Cinnamon and I really like everything except this leakage so far. Very sad because if this stays this way I have to say farewell... :(

[NeoGeo64]

Well, you can switch to Mint 17.1 KDE, XFCE or MATE. I'm considering doing that.

I like Mint but Cinnamon is just too buggy. With any other desktop, maybe we could enjoy the benefits of Mint without the bugs.

~ Neo

P.S. And if that don't work we can just find another distro. I've basically given up trying to contact the developers and get things fixed. It's always something we, the users, are doing to make our system use too much memory, or become unstable. Their code is perfect and their machines are always humming along fine. Yeah, right, OK. On 02/14/2015 12:48 PM, vpal wrote:

Same issue here on Linux Mint 17.1, got to about 500MB in a few hours. I'm new to Cinnamon and I really like everything except this leakage so far. Very sad because if this stays this way I have to say farewell... :(

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3690#issuecomment-74384645.

[vpal]

Yeah, it's really not about that I want to be offensive in any way. I really appreciate all the work the people working on Cinnamon have done and it is really a very good direction and approach after Gnome 3 and Unity. And I can really live with some smaller bugs. But I'm using the computer for work and I need a certain level of stability and reliability though. So a memory leak of this level not fixed on the short term is really something that prevents a product from being production ready.

On 02/14/2015 07:00 PM, Tony wrote:

Well, you can switch to Mint 17.1 KDE, XFCE or MATE. I'm considering doing that.

I like Mint but Cinnamon is just too buggy. With any other desktop, maybe we could enjoy the benefits of Mint without the bugs.

~ Neo

P.S. And if that don't work we can just find another distro. I've basically given up trying to contact the developers and get things fixed. It's always something we, the users, are doing to make our system use too much memory, or become unstable. Their code is perfect and their machines are always humming along fine. Yeah, right, OK. On 02/14/2015 12:48 PM, vpal wrote:

Same issue here on Linux Mint 17.1, got to about 500MB in a few hours. I'm new to Cinnamon and I really like everything except this leakage so far. Very sad because if this stays this way I have to say farewell... :(

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub

https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3690#issuecomment-74384645.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3690#issuecomment-74385120.

[mtwebster]

Can you tell me does this behavior manifest with stock applets/desklets and extensions only? Or are you using 3rd party replacements? By stock, I mean the ones with the padlock next to them in the settings list.

[brownsr]

neogeo64: can I please refer you to my comment on 6th Jan, and could you please give as much specific information as you can. People are very motivated to correct memory leaks, but they are not necessarily easy to find, so very specific information is helpful. I am running the latest development version built from git master, and things do seem considerably improved from my original report.

[vpal]

I'm using two that don't have the padlock next them: http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/17 http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/79 Should I try uninstalling them?

[JosephMcc]

@vpal You don't have to uninstall them, just remove them from the panel and restart Cinnamon. I use the weather one and don't have the reported memory issues but I've never tried the other one.

@NeoGeo64 I really don't get the attitude of some of your posts. You say none of the developers are responding to your issue yet mtwebster, one of the main Cinnamon devs, responded IN THIS VERY THREAD trying to get some info from people to help troubleshoot the problem. Since then I haven't seen a single post from you providing any of that. Instead you respond with "they say it's the user's fault and their code is perfect". Really? The reality is that there is something with your systems configuration, the cinnamon features you use, the apps you use, or some combination of those things that leads you to encounter this issue while a lot of people don't. That's not placing blame. Without knowing those things we have no way of trying to reproduce the steps to cause the problem which means we have little chance of being able to fix it.

[ghost]

This has not be resolved never on that way, please focus on doing the things better, and not to write criticals or defenses... We want (all) the best things for cinnamon, we have not divergent criteria of the main contents. I'm a user and also i can develop some applications, so i can understand, this is not the way....

[collinss]

@NeoGeo64 I'm not one of the devs for Cinnamon, but I have written and maintained a number of applets, and I can say from experience that it is extremely frustrating when people post a comment saying that they have a bug that they expect me to fix immediately, while giving no additional information to help me track it down, and then get upset when I can't do it because I can't reproduce it and have no idea what's causing it. As @JosephMcc @mtwebster @brownsr and others have pointed out, your comments about the devs and how you think they are treating you are completely unfounded, and don't help anyone. You are never going to find a perfect OS, or a perfect DE (though in my mind Linux Mint Cinnamon comes closer to it than anything else I have ever used), but if you have that much of a problem with it, then maybe you should switch. Either way, your jabs and accusations about the devs are not appreciated, so please stop.

[rickyzhang82]

@lestcape I totally agree with you. Can anyone write an instruction how to report the configuration? Is mtwebster's instruction still valid?

[tyler71]

@JosephMcc @collinss NeoGeo64 is just blowing smoke.. https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/2986#issuecomment-71335669 https://github.com/NeoGeo64?tab=activity

Unless there is an actual link to anything claimed, I would just ignore it.

[ghost]

@rickyzhang82 thats is a good point, will be important write an appropriate short manual of how report problems. The devs could refer the user about the manual, without lost time, when is needed. Opposite to this I consider that a normal user can not make an appropriate report of a memory problems. The most reports here don't say anything to the devs (included my own reports).

[JosephMcc]

Yes @mtwebsters instruction is still valid. You don't have to be a linux genius to give helpful information. The best place to start is probably to disable any 3rd party applets, desklets, and extensions for a couple days just to rule them out as causes of the issue. Open the built in System Monitor app and click on the Memory column until it's sorted highest to lowest. Cinnamon is probably somewhere near the top even on a fresh startup. Leave the app up on your desktop and go about your normal business. Keep an eye an Cinnamons memory usage. Is it climbing steadily? Is it climbing only when you do certain things? Devs can always ask you more questions to help narrow it down but there has to be a place to at least start. Be aware that the memory usage will grow to some extent but it should pretty much level off.

If you want you can also use this: https://github.com/mtwebster/Cinnamonitor It's a panel applet that by default will show Cinnamons memory and cpu usage on the panel.

It's also helpful if you let us know what distro and Cinnamon version you are running. You can get the cinnamon version by opening a terminal and running cinnamon --version

[NeoGeo64]

Look, I'm sorry for "attacking" the development team for Mint/Cinnamon.
Perception is reality and that is just how I felt. Sorry for voicing my opinion on the matter.

~ Neo On 02/15/2015 01:07 AM, JosephMcc wrote:

Yes @mtwebsters instruction is still valid. You don't have to be a linux genius to give helpful information. The best place to start is probably to disable any 3rd party applets, desklets, and extensions for a couple days just to rule them out as causes of the issue. Open the built in System Monitor app and click on the Memory column until it's sorted highest to lowest. Cinnamon is probably somewhere near the top even on a fresh startup. Leave the app up on your desktop and go about your normal business. Keep an eye an Cinnamons memory usage. Is it climbing steadily? Is it climbing only when you do certain things? Devs can always ask you more questions to help narrow it down but there has to be a place to at least start. Be aware that the memory usage will grow to some extent but it should pretty much level off.

If you want you can also use this: https://github.com/mtwebster/Cinnamonitor It's a panel applet that by default will show Cinnamons memory and cpu usage on the panel.

It's also helpful if you let us know what distro and Cinnamon version you are running. You can get the cinnamon version by opening a terminal and running cinnamon --version

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/3690#issuecomment-74405615.

[gooberfoob]

I would like to make a comment about this memory leak issue. I will agree with you all that posting aggressive comments will not resolve the problem. I am using Antergos w/ Cinnamon, and I have experienced two bugs. First is the memory leak that has been mentioned. The leak for me seems to happen when I run my computer for a few days. From basic observation it seems to be from opening and closing firefox. My system will run around 400 mb of memory idle, and after a few days it will go up to 800mb idle. I will do more research into it and see what I come up with. The other bug I have come across is, when I do the troubleshooting option to restart just cinnamon, not the whole system I will get a black screen and will cause me to restart the whole computer to fix it. This only happens sometimes. Along with restarting the DE I will loose all the icons on my GUI desktop, but they will be there when I navigate into the GUI file system. Hopefully I was clear and precise with the small amount of information I gave. If anyone has suggestions for what I can do I am 100% on board to help in anyway. Thank you cinnamon devs for all the work you do.

[vpal]

I disabled all third party apps and haven't experienced memory consumption above 300MB since then, but I'm really not sure if this is related in any way. Though there was no extreme memory consumption since disabling apps, Cinnamon's memory consumption is really unstable. It seems to grow all the time I would say the difference is only in the growth rate. It mostly starts up with around 150MB and also stays on that level for a while and then starts to grow slowly. From what I have seen to about 250MB. I'm not sure about to how much it can go up as I restarted my computer often in the last time. Question to the developers: What is/would be the amount of memory Cinnamon should consume without third party apps enabled? It is also really strange to me that third party apps can influence Cinnamon's memory usage. If they are that really risks the stability of Cinnamon. I also asked all my colleagues who use Cinnamon and they reported memory usage between 250 and 350 MB.

[dalcde]

I have around 115 MB. It makes sense that third party extensions affect Cinnamon's memory usage. It's just like running any program, say firefox, will increase the memory consumption of your computer. Since the third party Cinnamon extensions "live inside" Cinnamon, their memory consumption will be counted as Cinnamon's. More importantly, if they are poorly written, there can be lots of memory leaks and will cause huge memory consumption.

[vpal]

@dalcde That is the point: Cinnamon extensions "live inside" Cinnamon That not only risks Cinnamon's stability by design but is also very likely a security risk as... Yep FF's memory consumption increases the memory consumption of my system but not my DE's memory consumption.