Xfwm4 Memory Leak

I left my old desktop running since May 7, and just noticed that it was very noisy. I managed to ssh into it and found that it had used the 16gig of memory and 16 gig of swap.

When I left it running, I had a bunch of firefox windows running and top showed various “Web Content” processes consuming 15-17% of memory. Once I killed these the fan stopped, but I was left with the highest memory usage.

xfwm4 using 13.5% of memory and 2.1g in the RES column on top.

xfwm4 --version

    This is xfwm4 version 4.16.1 (revision 5f61a84ad) for Xfce 4.16
    Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
    Compiled against GTK+-3.24.24, using GTK+-3.24.29.

    Build configuration and supported features:
    - Startup notification support:                 Yes
    - XSync support:                                Yes
    - Render support:                               Yes
    - Xrandr support:                               Yes
    - Xpresent support:                             Yes
    - X Input 2 support:                            No
    - Embedded compositor:                          Yes
    - Epoxy support:                                Yes
    - KDE systray proxy (deprecated):               No

Can’t confirm it on my end:

top - 21:05:37 up 23 min,  1 user,  load average: 0,75, 0,87, 0,95
Tasks: 324 total,   1 running, 323 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%CPU(s):  0,0 us,  0,0 sy,  0,0 ni, 99,9 id,  0,0 wa,  0,0 hi,  0,0 si,  0,0 st
MiB Spch:  16024,5 total,  12297,8 free,   1863,9 used,   1862,8 buff/cache
MiB Swap:      0,0 total,      0,0 free,      0,0 used.  13747,0 avail Spch

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     ZEIT+ BEFEHL   
   1451 phil      20   0  797700  77120  55000 S   0,7   0,5   0:15.61 xfwm4  

top - 20:47:17 up 39 days, 2:57, 4 users, load average: 0.01, 0.01, 0.07
Tasks: 245 total, 1 running, 239 sleeping, 0 stopped, 5 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.2 us, 0.5 sy, 0.0 ni, 99.3 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 15882.9 total, 6477.6 free, 7887.6 used, 1517.7 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 17503.2 total, 5469.3 free, 12033.9 used. 7636.6 avail Mem

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                          

1014 rjd 20 0 3413060 2.1g 14912 S 0.3 13.6 9:27.29 xfwm4

Whereas my new desktop has much more normal usage

if you leave content open, it’s running & won’t release what ever it’s using back to the system. xfwm4 is the window manager, it’s going to be involved with what ever is running & if the process doesn’t close or is constantly changing(web content) of course the memory is going to climb.

I have not seen it climb like that before. It has stayed high after the other high memory items were closed.

some content is cached, for speed purposes, if it’s a app you use regularly it might hold on to it longer.
are you experiencing slow downs / lock ups?

unused ram is wasted ram