Question

I've noticed that Skipper is consuming huge amounts of VRAM when open for several hours with the following config:

• Skipper AppImage Linux
• Ubuntu 23.04 with GNOME 44
• X11
• 2560x1440@165Hz@100%

Output of nvidia-smi - you can clearly see mutter-x11-frames consuming >3GB VRAM

Thu May 11 16:54:57 2023       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 525.105.17   Driver Version: 525.105.17   CUDA Version: 12.0     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce ...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   53C    P0    34W / 115W |   5197MiB / 16384MiB |      3%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                  |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      7922      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg               1006MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      8177      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell              258MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      8194      G   ...libexec/mutter-x11-frames     3380MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      8565      G   .../usr/bin/telegram-desktop       57MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      9345      G   ...veSuggestionsOnlyOnDemand       79MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      9403      G   ...RendererForSitePerProcess       35MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A     10826      G   ...993402366275824947,131072       74MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A     11110      G   ...b/thunderbird/thunderbird      171MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A     12386      G   ...features=BackForwardCache       63MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A     39624      G   /usr/bin/nautilus                  11MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A     49680      G   ...RendererForSitePerProcess       28MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A    165800      G   /usr/bin/gjs                       24MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Comments

If you're receiving this error this means that only xcb is available on your system and probably xcb is automatically used.

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That is a logical deduction. However, that means that this is the issue that is causing VRAM leak, in my opinion. How can we work around this?
Wayland on NVIDIA is unusable, as reported by many users on Canonical Launchpad, including myself.

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Unfortunately for now I'm not able to tell you what is causing this issue. It can be some inefficiency in the Qt library itself or some compatibility issue on your computer.

I'm not fully aware of how Nvidia drivers as the same as mutter-x11-frames working with Qt.

Isn't possible that this mutter-x11-frames process is shared across multiple processes for example?

Anyway, unfortunately, there is not much more that we can do. We're not working with Nvidia drivers directly, we're using Qt libraries for GUI access, and the model is generated/drawn on Canvas also via Qt.

I would like to fix it and help you more, but for now, I'm not sure how.

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Thanks a lot for your replies.
I understand your position, obviously. So I will try to debug the issue more and will let you know of my findings.
I've arrived at the conclusion of Skipper causing the VRAM leak as the leak only occurs after I've launched Skipper and left it open for several hours.

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Thanks for understanding. Unfortunately, it's a such complex and probably not directly related bug that we're not able to easily fix it :-(.

You can try to keep Skipper open without opened model vs opened, etc. To check what exactly is causing the error.

Also, you can try to close all models (projects) and keep Skipper open only on the welcome screen if VRAM consumption will be lowered.