Gnome-shell 41.4 cause huge disk write for about 200GB within 3 days in primary disk

[Pythonora_Nybon]

• system: archlinux latest
• gnome-version: 41.4

I’m not an programmer familiar with gnome or gtk boundings, and just an daily linux user without enough experience for debugging linux and gnome.

This is an very long time tracing for this problem from gnome-40 to gnome-41 as that I didn’t get any primary-disk(i.e. where the root fsystem lying on) huge disk writes in any time since my main working space is all depending on the external portable HDDs and the second pcie 3.0 SSD hosted in my laptop’s external M.2 slot.

My confusions are:

1. Why gnome-shell need to do huge disk I/O for running, which in my experience, gome-shell has its own memory scope to handle the startup and the running state. The only occasions to using disk I/O in my opnion is to store the user config modifications (e.g. dconf service) and journal log data rely on the systemd(maybe?)

2. If thus on for that gnome-shell indeed handle some operation rely on the disk I/O, why its need to do as large as what I suprised as insane.

My hopes:

1. Is some one else bumped with the same occasion as this, I hope you to post your commentry here even for the resolution (that’s so good for me).

2. I know there’s too much professional guys here, can any one of you try to tell me how and why this happenned and any solutions with my great appreciates.

[rschupp (Roderich Schupp)]

AFAICT the value in column “Disk write total” of gnome-system-monitor is the value of write_bytes in /proc/[pid]/io (obtained via libgtop), e.g.

cat /proc/$$/io
rchar: 3337543622
wchar: 3337457414
syscr: 25717
syscw: 25599
read_bytes: 3342278656
write_bytes: 3337461760
cancelled_write_bytes: 0

When a process exits, the final values of all items in its proc/[pid]/io are added to the corresponding items of its parent process. Since gnome-shell starts most applications on your desktop over time it will accumulate all their write_bytes. Same goes for bash in the second row of your screenshot.