[моё] The Mystery of GNOME's Video Memory Consumption Revealed
A couple of days ago, I became interested in the question of why the gnome-shell process (from GNOME 48, Wayland, fully stock Ubuntu 25.04 x64) started consuming almost twice as much VRAM (450MiB versus 250MiB just a couple of days earlier).
Ah, you know, toys are slowing down, every megabyte counts.
A quick search on the Internet yielded nothing, only episodic mentions that, indeed, GNOME loves to munch on video memory, sometimes devouring up to 16 GB on truly monstrous machines.
And that's it.
I had to recall my testing skills and step-by-step restore my actions with the system over the past few days.
Roll them back point by point.
And, of course, measure the effect of changes!
It turned out that GNOME, for some reason, caches the ENTIRE list of wallpapers that the user has added to the list of wallpapers!
Illustration 1: 1 (one) wallpaper
Illustration 2: +6 wallpapers
Moreover, at least +50MiB will be occupied even after a clean reboot.
And consumption will grow proportionally to the number of added wallpapers.
Although the user is unlikely to see them in their life.
But for some reason, GNOME keeps them at hand...
Decent thing would be to scold them somewhere on discourse.gnome.org or even on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/4365, but... I don't feel like it.
Let this be our little secret for now.
Times when performance was cared about are gone. That's it. Can't stop them from shooting themselves in the foot.
Let it remain so.
Don't give GNOME too many wallpapers to choose from, save your video memory.
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