Memory leak in Cinnamon 4.0.9 (Mint 19.1)

[bajhn]

Since I upgraded to Mint 19.1 from 18.something at the beginning of the week, I've been noticing that the interface isn't as crisp as I was accustomed to. Cinnamon seemed to be showing up high in the top listing with noticeable CPU time (15-50%), and this morning I realized that the resident working set size had grown to nearly 1 GB. Four hours later, it's at 1.17 GB. My current Cinnamon session is somewhere between 24 and 34 hours since I logged in. What information can I provide to facilitate diagnosis? (I'll attach lnxi output momentarily.)

[bajhn]

Enabled applets:

• Cinnamon calendar applet
  Keyboard
  Menu
  Network Manager
  Notifications
  Panel Launchers
  Power Manager
  Removable Drives
  Show Desktop
  Sound
  System Tray
  User Applet
  Window List
  Windows Quick List
  CPU Temperature Indicator

[Pjotr]

Self-installed (non-default) applets and desklets are the usual suspects.

Plus you generally have a cleaner and healthier system, when you do a clean installation of a Mint from a newer series, instead of upgrading from one series (18.x) to another (19.x).

[bajhn]

My upgrade procedure was doing a fresh installation of the OS from the Linux Mint DVD, then losing a tarball of my home directory, so if there's any cruft, it's in my settings. I didn't notice any problem with Cinnamon in my old installation except occasional "Cinnamon has crashed -- do you want to restart it?" messages. They weren't bothersome, and performance never suffered. I could leave my session logged in, with the lock screen on whenever I was away; now Cinnamon is turning into a memory hog after one day.

The only non-default applet I'm aware of is the CPU temperature applet. I have one desklet, the analog clock that came with Mint. I'll try disabling both when I go in tomorrow. I can also see how a freshly created user's profile performs.

[Valsodar]

I had the same problem with Mint immediately after fresh installation. A system reboot did the trick for a while but when I installed Discord 2 days later, the problem returned and the rest of the 40% of the CPU were immediately taken by it. So I installed back 18.3 and now everything's working so smoothly now that one could drift a car on it.

[bajhn]

It looks the source of my memory leak was the Cinnamon Power Manager applet. I conducted a test over several nights wherein I'd disable one applet or desklet, write down cinnamon's memory usage before going home, and then check it again in the morning. Cinnamon's memory usage actually went down a little overnight after I disabled the Power Manager applet. (FWIW, after disabling and before recording the memory usage, I logged out of Cinnamon and back in again.) I'll try contacting the Power Manager applet folks and see if anything can be done.

[bajhn]

Or maybe not. As part of my diagnostic work, I also created a user and used the default applet set for the same kind of testing, and it looks like that user also had the Power Manager applet enabled, but I didn't see any increase in memory usage for that account. Anyway, I'll still contact the applet folks, as I like having a battery indicator.

[elbarbudo]

I use the LMDE 4 (debbie) and I noticed a brutal increase of the memory used by Cinnamon after several days of use, without logout.

On the beginning : Cinnamon uses between 2.5% to 3% of the memory, but it increases to 85% of my memory.

I am not able to find out the cause because my use is almost the same : Thunderbird, Vivaldi and Steam

inxi
CPU: Dual Core Intel Core i3-2100 (-MT MCP-) speed/min/max: 3036/1600/3100 MHz Kernel: 4.19.0-14-amd64 x86_64 Up: 10h 29m
Mem: 1909.3/3854.1 MiB (49.5%) Storage: 3.76 TiB (79.1% used) Procs: 222 Shell: bash 5.0.3 inxi: 3.0.32

[Moem]

I use the LMDE 4 (debbie) and I noticed a brutal increase of the memory used by Cinnamon after several days of use, without logout.

If you want to talk about that, please start a topic in the LMDE section of the forum. This topic is too old and deserves its eternal rest.