[CentOS] Out of memory

Wed Dec 19 17:13:12 UTC 2018
Yan Li <elliot.li.tech at gmail.com>

On 12/19/18 5:05 AM, Jerry Geis wrote:
> I have three machines running CentOS 7.6 in desktop mode. 2 are fine.
> 1 of them is having a memory issue that is Out of memory
> [17878]  1000 17878  2069991    42311 11898880        0             0
> gnome-shell
> 
> This gnome-shell looking at /var/log/messages after reboot - is the HIGHEST
> amount of memory. Looking at "top" now - it certainly does not use that
> amount of ram at this time.
> 
> These are the gnome-shell packages installed.
> rpm -qa | grep gnome-shell
> gnome-shell-extension-alternate-tab-3.28.1-5.el7.noarch
> gnome-shell-extension-top-icons-3.28.1-5.el7.noarch
> gnome-shell-extension-window-list-3.28.1-5.el7.noarch
> gnome-shell-extension-launch-new-instance-3.28.1-5.el7.noarch
> gnome-shell-extension-apps-menu-3.28.1-5.el7.noarch
> gnome-shell-extension-common-3.28.1-5.el7.noarch
> gnome-shell-extension-user-theme-3.28.1-5.el7.noarch
> gnome-shell-extension-places-menu-3.28.1-5.el7.noarch
> gnome-shell-3.28.3-6.el7.x86_64
> 
> Why is gnome-shell eating my memory? What can I do?

/rant: gnome-shell has always been this resource hog in the past few 
years, maybe after they started using JavaScript for almost everything. 
There are countless memory leaks that are being patched. 3.29 and 3.30 
both have important fixes that are not in the 3.28 shipped by Red Hat 
for RHEL 7.6.

> Basically - the machine isn't even doing anything. Boots up and shows one
> static web page. At this time that is all. Then about 24 hours later its
> out of memory. The other 2 machines that seem fine - are showing the same
> web page. But not out of memory.

On workstations, I have to hit Alt-F2 and type "r" to restart 
gnome-shell every morning to keep its memory use at bay. For long 
running sessions, I'd switch away from GNOME. Maybe to Cinnamon, XFCE, 
or any other lightweight desktop environments. Fixing the memory leaks 
of gnome-shell is not trivial.

-- 
Yan Li