My rockpro64 install has been acting up lately. I looked into it and found plasmashell has been eating memory. It just keeps taking in more and more until the system runs out of swap and dies. The only fixes I could find were related to NVIDIA drivers, which this computer doesn’t have, and some git packages being installed mistakenly, which this system also doesnt have. I can open up ksysguard and see plasmashell’s memory usage constantly climbing.
What’s going on?
I am running Plasma 5.20.5-2 on X11 and my plasmashell seems to be holding steady at 120,680K resident and 159,344K shared.
Edit: Now my plasmashell has ticked up to 120,722 resident. How quickly does your memory consumption increase? Is this over a matter of hours or days?
Edit2: Now my plasmashell is at 122,796K.
Edit 3: Now at 123,472K.
Edit 4: After 2 hours of spot checks, I am at 123,480K.
I can get 7 or 8 hours of uptime before plasmashell kills my system. I tried using a Wayland session instead. It was smoother but there were graphical glitches. In terms of stability, exact same problem occurred.
I wish GNOME didn’t suck so hard on this thing.
I am now up to 124,932K, so it is creeping up overall, but I have seen it give memory back too. I use mine all day at the office and had not noticed an issue at all, until you posted. But I will keep my eye on it.
I have 16GB of RAM in my PC and I’ve never had more than 8GB consumed. I even considered disabling my SWAP space.
So I don’t think it’s only Plasma…
I have 4 gigs to work with here. its not a full computer. It’s an SBC.
I get it. Maybe, and this is just a random thought, you could try something like Xfce and see if the problem persists. Because, I would never even have considered Plasma for a SBC…
plasma actually runs the fastest on this board. It’s an odd duck. GNOME runs worst but it is most stable.
That is strange yes. I have no idea what to tell you, except look at the MATE DE as well. Other than that, i have no clue as to what’s going on or what can help.
Hope you manage!
I noticed that plasmashell is using a lot of CPU on my Pinebook Pro compared to plasmashell on a similar specced x86 running kubuntu. Maybe it’s just because it is running on one of the small cores. 
Or, perhaps, I’m really not sure, it’s to do with the graphics?
Or something like that.
This is using a 1 minute sample so there are a few hours here. As you can see, I have yet to hit 3GB and I have memory set aside for nfs caching and use tmpfs quite a bit. So while Plasmashell does use a bit more memory as the day goes along, it is not much. Not enough to make a noticeable difference, it never gets beyond the normal ups and downs of total memory used.
