My Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS upgrade from Ubuntu 22.04 in a DELL XP13 7390 laptop keeps crashing every hour or so consistently. I have tried turning off applications in an effort to isolate the culprit. Today I finally found it after watching in htop and tailing and observing the syslog files while filtering for the oom and error keywords.
The memory leak is coming from gjs, the Gnome JavaScript bindings project (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gjs). When I kill its process, the memory utilization drops dramatically, from close to 15 GB to the baseline, 5 GB with Firefox and a terminal running. I see gjs almost immediately restarted, a GNOME service must do it, and I can watch again over the next hour how the memory grows unbound until the crash happens again unless I kill gjs again.
What can I do to stop this program permanently? Maybe what GNOME component or service do I need to deactivate and disable? These questions do not address what I am seeing:
- High CPU% on gnome-shell leads to unresponsive computer
- POP desktop : What is this 'gjs' process which taking up so much memory and cpu?
The syslog entry that consistently appears shortly before the crash is:
2024-12-13T15:05:16.696376-07:00 XPS13 kernel: oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=user.slice,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service,task=gjs,pid=40652,uid=1000
2024-12-13T15:05:16.696377-07:00 XPS13 kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 40652 (gjs) total-vm:13655956kB, anon-rss:9697484kB, file-rss:340kB, shmem-rss:0kB, UID:1000 pgtables:24892kB oom_score_adj:100
Any help with Gnome would be greatly appreciated. The gjs version is 1.80.2.
