protonscr

GPU memory leak when switching between main tabs

steamopen NVIDIA driversSteam clientWeb Component
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#9737 · opened 2023-06-27 by izik1 · updated 2023-06-27 · 0 comments · github
Iizik1 2023-06-27 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): 1687563636
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): nixos
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: yes (I was hoping the beta would fix this before I ever needed to report it, alas it did not)
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
  • Steam Logs: steam-logs.tar.gz
  • GPU: Nvidia

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

What happened:
Memory leak of GPU memory (followed by shared memory -> swap -> OOM killer -> dead system, although I have no swap) leading to unbounded memory usage.
What I expected to happen: GPU memory usage capping out at some arbitrary bound (probably less than 1gb? but definitely less than 6+), and not indefinitely growing.

I'm not entirely sure what the root cause is, unfortunately, however I can reliably reproduce this with the steps below on multiple window managers (i3wm and awesome-wm specifically have been tested)

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Open a tool that can do GPU memory monitoring, such as nvidia-settings, I personally used nvitop
  2. open steam (relevant steam settings can be provided upon request, I have no clue what'd be useful here)
  3. click between the store, library, community and <user profile> tabs in no particular order, I'd recommend doing so rapidly for exaggerated effect, but slowly works fine. Note that you don't have to wait for the page to load before changing tabs again in order to trigger the issue.
  4. observe the GPU memory utilization grow higher until it starts swapping out to CPU-ram (warning: your system may experience heavy lag), for me this starts happening at about 80%, and the remaining 20% fills up as a ratio of my main memory usage.
  5. observe your main RAM utilization grow ever higher
  6. When you get bored (or your system crashes) close steam.
  7. Observe the GPU memory utilization drop massively (and depending on how long you did this, your main memory utilization too)... Unless your system crashed, of course.

I have not exhaustively checked for a minimal set of tab changes that would trigger the leak, nor have I searched for every single tab change that might cause it, however, hopefully this report works as a starting point.

Nothing extracted yet.