The Big GNOME Shell Memory Leak Has Been Plugged, Might Be Backported To 3.28

The widely talked about "GNOME Shell memory leak" causing excessive memory usage after a while with recent versions of GNOME has now been fully corrected. The changes are currently staged in Git for what will become GNOME 3.30 but might also be backported to 3.28.

Well known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has provided an update on the matter and confirmed that the issue stems from GJS - the GNOME JavaScript component - with the garbage collection process not being fired off as it should.

But now the garbage collection process for GJS is being triggered whenever an object is marked for destruction. Thereby the main memory leak should be plugged while the extra garbage collection cycles shouldn't hurt the system performance much.

The pull requests are honored but as of writing have not yet been backported to GNOME 3.28. This memory leak fix along with other recent GNOME performance improvements, including some additional ongoing work, is great news for getting GNOME more fit in 2018.

More details on the memory leak fix can be found via Georges' blog.