Created attachment 108295 [details] Example of high unreported memory consumption. Memory consumption of an unknown process (not listed in (h)top) becomes all consuming, taking up all available ram+swap space. The memory is not released after killing plasmashell (killall plasmashell) but is when restarting it (kstart plasmashell).
That's not how Linux memory works.
(In reply to David Edmundson from comment #1) > That's not how Linux memory works. This is just what I observe. My guess is that in the process of starting plasmashell something else gets restarted which clears the leak. I can't pinpoint what the memory is being used for. All I know is that over the duration of a few hours the used memory pages increases to the point where swapping starts and eventually the entire system slows down to an unbearable crawl. If you could help me pinpoint the source I might be able to be more descriptive.
Not exactly proof, but this is a before and after a restart. $ free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15G 9.1G 158M 5.7G 6.3G 344M Swap: 15G 1.9G 13G $ killall plasmashell && kstart plasmashell $ free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15G 7.1G 7.5G 128M 996M 7.9G Swap: 15G 7.0M 15G ~9G of memory freed by performing the restart, and all I can do is promise that just the killing of plasmashell doesn't give this result. Do not know what else I can provide to confirm.
I'm more than happy to believe that you get memory back when you kill plasmashell. That's generic memory leak, search on here for the one about slideshow, if you're on Qt5.9.1 it's probably that.