Cinnamon 5.4.x is using a lot more RAM than 5.3.x did

[nick-s-b]

 * Cinnamon version (cinnamon --version)
Cinnamon 5.4.2
 * Distribution - (Mint 17.2, Arch, Fedora 25, etc...)
Linux ArchLinux 5.18.8-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed, 29 Jun 2022 23:03:08 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux
 * Graphics hardware *and* driver used
Nvidia 515.57
 * 32 or 64 bit
64bit

Issue
Long time ago, I setup a small script that check and displays notifications when cinnamon process crosses some memory threshold. Prior to upgrade to 5.4.0, I had that limit set to 1.5GB. Only once every few months I would get a notification.

After upgrading to 5.4.x, I was getting the notification all the time so I changed the script to notify me after 1.7GB is crossed. Now I get a notification every hour or so and the only "solution" is to restart the process.

Today I decided not to restart after crossing the 1.7GB just to see how high it will go. Well, cinnamon is using over 2.1GB or RAM now.

I have a 4K display with ~10 Chromium windows each with multiple tabs open, I have 4 terminal windows open, 4-5 mpv videos open (minimized), 4 PDFs open with Xreader

Steps to reproduce
Upgrade, use it as you normally would, open a bunch of windows and watch the memory usage spike.

Expected behaviour
I'm not sure if this is a memory leak or something else has changed in 5.4.x

[cocoa1231]

Can confirm, I had this too in lmde, had to switch to manjaro because computer was getting unusable for my work

[mtwebster]

@cocoa1231 What graphics card are you using?

I've noticed this as well but only for my nvidia desktop. With my laptop using intel I've got 60 hours uptime on cinnamon and memory holds at 278mb - not much different than 5.2, for me at least.

I'll try to track down why this is happening - I notice a significant jump when changing my display setup, for instance.

[JosephMcc]

If @cocoa1231 had this issue on LMDE then I assume it wouldn't be related to Cinnamon 5.4 changes.

I'm on Nvidia and currently sitting at 240mb after 29 hours. I'll keep an eye on it.

@nick-s-b You said you are on a 4K display. Are you using the fractional scaling settings by chance?

[nick-s-b]

@JosephMcc No. my monitor scale is set to 100% or 1:1.

[cocoa1231]

@JosephMcc I'm not on Nvidia. It's a laptop with Core i5 and Intel integrated graphics. 12GB of DDR4 memory. I was noticing that on LMDE my resource usage was spiking up to 40% with just 5 or 7 firefox tabs, a few terminals and VSCodium open. I needed to analyze large datasets with Julia but the memory usage went up too high for the laptop to be functional with the dataset loaded once in memory.