Budgie TOP Results, RAM Problem? Swap Files?

1

Budgie gets ‘fatter’ and slower in about 15 minutes until it freezes. Some times, as I type, the letters don’t appear for a few moments, then they jump into where I’m typing.

This slow down happens if I just let the unit idle or am using it with up to 4 open tabs. I self-limit the number of tabs just because I think it’s wise anyway.

Ubuntu 19.04
Memory = 1.9 GiB
Processor Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz x2
Graphics = Intel 945G
GNOME 3.32.1
OS Type = 64 bit
Disk 250.1 GB

Here’s my TOP results:

*[code]*top - 14:39:59 up 15 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.92, 1.38, 1.17
Tasks: 197 total,   1 running, 196 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  5.0 us,  2.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 91.5 id,  1.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   1979.4 total,    360.4 free,   1120.6 used,    498.3 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   2048.0 total,   1838.0 free,    210.0 used.    550.1 avail Mem 

  **PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND**                 
 1304 surferj+  20   0  492644  27232  18888 S   4.0   1.3   0:23.38 budgie-wm               
  860 root      20   0  208116  33096  25608 S   3.0   1.6   0:31.58 Xorg                    
 2998 surferj+  20   0  514148  63948  50108 S   3.0   3.2   0:07.96 tilix                   
 2603 surferj+  20   0 2453824 111052  71016 S   2.3   5.5   0:10.91 Web Content             
 1311 surferj+  20   0 1290668  19640  14228 S   0.7   1.0   0:04.84 budgie-panel            
 2510 surferj+  20   0 3148912 256188 108792 S   0.3  12.6   1:24.54 firefox                 
 2732 surferj+  20   0 2430356 114688  71052 S   0.3   5.7   0:07.78 Web Content             
 2837 surferj+  20   0 2530460 216424 121676 S   0.3  10.7   0:27.34 Web Content             
 3082 surferj+  20   0   11768   3476   3052 R   0.3   0.2   0:00.13 top                     
    1 root      20   0   99844   5788   4368 S   0.0   0.3   0:03.40 systemd                 
    2 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd                
    3 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_gp                  
    4 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 rcu_par_gp              
    6 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0H-kblockd    
    7 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.31 kworker/u4:0-events_po+ 
    8 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.0   0.0   0:00.00 mm_percpu_wq            
    9 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.0   0.0   0:00.14 ksoftirqd/0  *[/code]*

What am I supposed to be looking for here?

I think it’s a swap-file problem but I do not recognize any of this code.

Another “TOP”—> a little bit later:

top - 14:53:53 up 29 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.40, 0.57, 0.89
Tasks: 195 total,   1 running, 194 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  2.5 us,  1.2 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   1979.4 total,    122.9 free,   1241.0 used,    615.5 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   2048.0 total,   1834.2 free,    213.8 used.    383.6 avail Mem

.
Do I need to load-in an older version of Budgie - and maybe this is a BETA version I’m using???

Here’s another “TOP” result - this is after the unit is really bogging down and I had a very hard time getting this to C/P here because of the intensse slow-down.

Ohhhh - one thing I notice is that my LED for DISK Action is frozen “ON” and doesn’t blink at al. The WiFi RTL unit just blinks in a rhythm that indicates it is ‘coasting’ or not doing anything WiFi-wise. FYI.

**surferjoe@UbuntuBudgie:~$ top**

top - 15:34:23 up  1:09,  1 user,  load average: 5.65, 3.69, 2.31
Tasks: 197 total,   1 running, 196 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 16.1 us,  5.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 72.0 id,  6.1 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.2 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   1979.4 total,     71.0 free,   1552.3 used,    356.1 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   2048.0 total,   1401.2 free,    646.8 used.    127.6 avail Mem 

  **PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND**                 
 4186 surferj+  20   0  514648  54192  40708 S   9.6   2.7   0:02.95 tilix                   
  860 root      20   0  212568  30900  24332 S   8.6   1.5   3:46.88 Xorg                    
 1304 surferj+  20   0  484080  20252  11828 S   8.6   1.0   2:15.54 budgie-wm               
 2700 surferj+  20   0 2967456 402988  94176 S   7.0  19.9  13:01.99 Web Content             
 1311 surferj+  20   0 1291252  21864  10076 S   5.0   1.1   0:14.24 budgie-panel            
 2510 surferj+  20   0 3731604 399784  82192 S   3.3  19.7  16:53.55 firefox                 
 1370 surferj+  20   0  367780   5628   3596 S   0.7   0.3   0:01.62 budgie-daemon           
 1391 surferj+  20   0  483480  14980   9548 S   0.7   0.7   0:06.80 plank                   
 1437 surferj+  20   0  291232  14152   5964 S   0.7   0.7   0:02.04 bamfdaemon              
 4251 surferj+  20   0   11768   3608   2928 R   0.7   0.2   0:00.07 top                     
   10 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.3   0.0   0:03.40 rcu_sched               
  174 root       0 -20       0      0      0 I   0.3   0.0   0:04.32 kworker/1:1H-kblockd    
  238 root      20   0       0      0      0 S   0.3   0.0   0:00.62 jbd2/sda1-8             
  642 avahi     20   0    8540   1396   1160 S   0.3   0.1   0:00.18 avahi-daemon            
 1462 surferj+  20   0 2136772  34076   4212 S   0.3   1.7   0:19.64 dropbox                 
 2621 surferj+  20   0 2985272 418648  16544 S   0.3  20.7   1:16.19 WebExtensions           
 3578 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   0.3   0.0   0:00.47 kworker/u4:3-events_po
2

you are RAM stressed - hence why its eating into your SWAP space - and the slow down is probably because of the disk utilisation coupled with your very slow processor.

You top results are illuminating - it shows that the vast majority of the RAM is taken up by firefox itself - 60% in the last lot of results.

My advice is to invest in at least another 2GB of RAM - you’ll be able to pick that up for the price of a pizza on amazon or ebay.

3

Ahhhh! I see!

I may be ready to retire this machine anyway - as my son is bringing me a much ‘hotter’ unit with game-playing ability although I don’t particularly care for games.

I will take a look at some RAM sticks I have floating around here from all the machines Ive dismantled for parts. I just like to refurbish and run them for a while and then pick up another one.

But I WILL try more RAM just for kicks and giggles.

Just a question: Does Firefox keep on staking out more RAM real estate for itself as run time increases? I seem to start out pretty good and as time goes by, it gets slower and slower.

4

I’m seeing very similar behaviour on two different machines, one with 4GB RAM and one with 8GB RAM. The main difference is that I’m seeing budgie-wm grabbing more and more of the available RAM until I also reach that slow-down state. Both machines have just been re-installed with Ubuntu Budgie 18.04.3. Even if I shut down Chrome, the memory used by budgie-wm is not released; the only way for that to happen is log-out / log-in. This has only started happening recently, but I didn’t note after what specific update the behaviour changed. Any thoughts would be appreciated:slightly_smiling_face:

5

I run 18.04.3 day-in-day out and I don’t see this issue. So I’m afraid I dont really have any ideas for this observation.

6

Since I’m going to replace this machine I should not agonize over this problem, but revisiting the RAM-swallowing piques my curiosity.

Just firing up and letting the machine sit there, doing nothing but chat a bit with itself via Wifi as it normally does… but not asking it to sign onto any web pages, etc… it will slow down and freeze after 10 minutes all by itself.

There’s some other quirky problem not related to just small memory or bad hard drives, etc. Oddly, Chromium eats RAM heavily as does Opera, but Firefox doesn’t… not as badly anyway. They all dwindle to a halt with time, some more quickly than others… and it wasn’t this way until somewhat recently.

Running Puppy Live via USB doesn’t have the same problem… although I know Puppy is a minimalist distro… and not a fair test.

It gets so bad that the Terminal won’t run no matter how patient I am in waiting for it to start up.

Funny that Firefox runs better than the other available browsers do as I always though it’s bloat-factor was the highest of them all. I have to hit the power button to shut down and reboot.

I have a few files that I have not backed up yet, so I imagine I’ll lose them when I try a clean install. That’s my fault for not taking command of my files. I guess it’s time to learn to use Puppy as a file saving device (more Linux education).

PS - I’m sending this via my Samsung Android Tablet since my Budgie desktop won’t let me… it’s getting worse.

7

I found a big sucker of RAM - viglink.com.

I get a small banner on the bottom of the screen saying that “Waiting for cl.viglink.com” and during that time, the lock-up happens and my HDD light is on, constantly.

Now - how do I get rid of this problem? Does “Reimage” or “Spyhunter” or “Malwarebytes” run on Ubuntu-based distros?

8

This should work

Basically it’s a browser click hijacker

9

Thank you for the response… I’ve done a bit more digging now. I forgot to mention earlier that I use the Variety wallpaper changer, and this seems to be causing the memory leak… similar to Bug#864680: RFS: budgie-desktop/10.3.1-2, which I found in my searching. I’ve reduced the frequency of changing the wallpaper (from every 30s to once a day), and it’s made a dramatic difference to the memory leak. I’m not sure if a regression has crept in somehow recently.
I’ll carry on with Variety changing at a slower rate, because that makes the problem much more manageable, but I wanted to give you the updated info as well

10

My colleague @vlijm has been running some tests changing the wallpaper every 10 seconds for a few hours. The memory usage has barely changed.

This tells me that budgie itself is very stable. Variety is doing something very weird. Suggest report this on the variety issue tracker on launchpad.

11

Will do… thank you. With my having slowed the rate at which Variety changes the wallpaper, my memory usage has now stabilised as well, so it’s definitely an issue with Variety

12

For info Bug #1845867 logged on launchpad, bug #226 logged on the Variety GitHub project

13

Hi @logb33 could you mention your exact settings? Although variety seems insanely ram-hungry (156 MB), it is not really increasing here.
For comparison: the switcher on experimental is only consuming ~500 Kb, so ~0.3% of that(!).

14

Hi @vlijm… some details:
Fresh Ubuntu Budgie 18.04.3 install
budgie-desktop-environment 0.9.9ubuntu1
ubuntu-budgie-desktop 0.32
budgie-desktop 10.4+git201710
Variety - original install 0.6.7 (I think) from Ubuntu repo. Upgraded to 0.7.1 with the PPA
Variety config:
Start when computer starts, change wallpaper every 1 hour (currently; I saw the memory leak fast when I was changing it every 30 s. I’ve seen this on two different PCs, set up the same)
Wallpaper images in NFS4 mounted folder. No images transformed, downloaded or copied anywhere by Variety
All other Variety settings left at default values or unselected, so all it is doing is changing the desktop wallpaper
My memory usage by Variety is not quite so bad (86MB), but you’re right… for what it’s doing that is crazy.
The one other thing I want to try is to fully uninstall Variety, and then install fresh from the PPA… it seems around v0.7.0, they migrated to Python 3, with some other clean-up just before and just after, so there may be some issue there…
When is your switcher likely to make it to stable?.. it sounds like just what I would want!
Please let me know if you need more information

15

hmm - the only thing vaguely unusual there is the NFS4 mount.

Try copying some images from the NFS folder to your local drive and configure variety to use the local folder. Does this improve matters?

16

@fossfreedom… that was actually one of my first thoughts. I had Variety set up previously using images on the local HDD, and then I changed it to use the NFS mount (to save copying a whole bunch of images to various machines); it was shortly after this that I first noticed the memory leak, so I changed it to use the local folder again, but it didn’t change the leak behaviour.
I have uninstalled, purged and then reinstalled Variety on the one PC, and I’m busy testing it at the moment; I’ll see this evening at home what the behaviour has been, and then I’ll report back again

17

No difference in the behaviour… still the memory leak. I’m seeing the %MEM value for budgie-wm in htop increasing… the rate depends on how often I switch wallpaper. I don’t know where the leak might be, but the memory usage is registering against budgie-wm. I’ve now also installed all the “recommended” packages as well, in case that might have an effect, but no difference…

1 Like
18

UPDATE -----

I decided to add a new HDD to my bay and after a clean format, I installed Linux Lite.

No more RAM troubles
No more swap-file problems
No more getting slower and slower in 1/2 hour (or much less— usually 15 minutes!)
No need to force a restart b/o frozen screen-mouse-keyboard, etc.

There’s something wrong with Budgie and I want an operating system - I don’t need/want to diagnose and write code to repair what should operate out of the box - or off the USB in this case.

Don’t get me wrong - I liked the feel of Budgie and it was pretty fast - but it kept on freezing up and dying in front of my eyes.

For the record - I have had Linux Lite running for six days without a reboot or a crash or a slow down or my mouse go paralytic.

19

Thanks for the update.

Good that you found an operating system that works for your particular hardware.

Best wishes.