Memory over-consumption: gnome-shell? google-chrome? slack?

Question

I am having issues on a ubuntu 19.04 computer: regular freezes, ...

Monitoring screenshots (htop)

During a memory overload...

(Unfortunately I didn't think of hiding userland threads on the 1^st, sorry for all the duplicate lines)

After a fresh boot, with no app launched...

After a fresh boot, with only google chrome launched...

After a fresh boot, with only slack launched...

Details

From what I understand, it could be a memory problem with gnome-shell, google chrome, or slack, ...

On the "memory overload" screenshot, it seems like gnome-shell was consuming ~40% of memory. Is it normal behavior?

Here is the gnome-shell version

$ gnome-shell --version
GNOME Shell 3.32.0

Here are the installed gnome-shell extensions:

elouan_keryell-even@baume:~$ ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 3 elouan_keryell-even elouan_keryell-even 4096 juin   5 15:15 .
drwx------ 3 elouan_keryell-even elouan_keryell-even 4096 juin   6 12:06 ..
drwxrwxr-x 4 elouan_keryell-even elouan_keryell-even 4096 juin   5 15:15 desktop-icons@csoriano

As for Google Chrome, here is its version: 73.0.3683.103-1

Answer 1

ps_mem

I found ps_mem (a Python script) really useful to debug this kind of issues.

Download the ps_mem script, chmod u+x it, open to read it, and if you find it trustworthy just sudo ./ps_mem.py.

You can then use it several ways, like listing by user:

for i in $(ps -e -o user= | sort | uniq); do   printf '%-20s%10s\n' $i $(sudo ./ps_mem.py --total -p $(pgrep -d, -u $i)); done | sort -rn -k2 -t' '

Or a certain user, like root or your user ($USER):

sudo ./ps_mem.py -p $(pgrep -d, -u $USER)

In your case, I would move to Brave (Chromium based, like Ungoogled Chromium) or Firefox, remove any unnecessary extensions (both on GNOME Shell and browser). Also check if you really need to have mysqld running all the time. Maybe consider using podman (better than docker) for temporary projects.