PulseAudio appears to be rather memory hungry (more than ever before?)
Summary
It seems rather unexpected that with 18 days uptime, PulseAudio would accumulate as much as 1.8 GB of memory:
$ pmap $(pidof pulseadio)
1574: /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no
000055d630f04000 20K r---- pulseaudio
000055d630f09000 44K r-x-- pulseaudio
000055d630f14000 28K r---- pulseaudio
000055d630f1c000 4K r---- pulseaudio
000055d630f1d000 4K rw--- pulseaudio
000055d632847000 1853212K rw--- [ anon ]
[...]
Version:
$ pulseaudio --version
pulseaudio 13.0-rebootstrapped
from official Fedora build:
$ rpm -q pulseaudio
pulseaudio-13.0-1.fc32.x86_64
I've tried searching for similar symptoms reported elsewhere, and indeed, there are some clues this is not an isolated case of mine:
- https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/64467
- https://forum.manjaro.org/t/pulseaudio-using-up-to-3gb-of-ram/108452
Note that after two more days to uptime, the situation did not change, so it doesn't appear to be a resource leak per se.
Also note that this machine has ~30.8 GiB physical memory available so that memory is not a scarce resource (and might factor into the decisions how much memory to opportunistically allocate, even?)
environment
From pa-info
script, I don't see any clues, the only relevant
buffer
occurrence is device.buffering.buffer_size = "352800"
(for 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family HD Audio Controller
from Intel).
Is there any reliable introspection, built-in or externally conductable, that would give clues as to where the memory went?