On 12/10/20 10:40 AM, William F Pokorny wrote:
> In povray.unoffical.patches, In early November I picked up a severe 
> performance issue with the preview feature and SDL2.0:
> 
> "Performance issue with preview and sdl2.0."
> 
> True, I guess, except the severity appears to be tangled in the fact the 
> Ubuntu 20.4.1 Gnome desktop is leaking memory over time. ...

An update. Playing with uxterms, watching /proc/meminfo over time... 
Thanks jr for the pointers. (The uxterms reduce the initial memory 
footprint)

Then, two days ago I hit the awful slowdown swapping windows, doing 
window / desktop stuff - while I still had 4GB plus free... Maybe more 
of a local gnome memory space filling or non linear algorithmic behavior 
apparent after time???

When it happened, I noticed I had a hanging empty desktop as was true on 
some of the other painful slowdowns too - easy to create by paging one 
workspace too far. So...

I found and installed a gnome-tweaks tool. Moved from dynamic desktops 
to 4 static ones and turned off animations. A hope it helps...

I also dug up the method to force the freeing of file buffering related 
memory the next time I see the slow down. It's apparent now most of the 
buff/cache consumption at any given time is file related. It also sunk 
in I was seeing previously "memory paging" - not necessarily swapping to 
and from the disk swap space - though some swap was consumed at the 
time. Wondering now if this activity was at all related to the Gnome 
slow down or just something which happened to be going on at the same time.

FWIW.

Bill P.

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