How do I stop Pulseaudio using huge amounts of memory?

Solution 1:

Are you sure that this is real memory consumption and not virtual-only? According to https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/MemoryConsumption/, it reserves 64 MB per client on virtual memory, but that should actually be "fine" and not result in OOM situations. On my 18.04 ubuntu, top shows e.g.

%Cpu(s):  4,1 us,  1,5 sy,  0,0 ni, 93,2 id,  1,1 wa,  0,0 hi,  0,0 si,  0,0 st
KiB Mem : 16135328 total,  1088888 free,  8108764 used,  6937676 buff/cache
KiB Swap:  1003516 total,   961276 free,    42240 used.  6562996 avail Mem 

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                   
[...]                                                                                
20428 delf       9 -11 2464944  13808  10264 S   4,6  0,1   3:05.72 pulseaudio

So ~2,5 gig on virtual memory, while actually %-memory consumed measured with ps shows:

% ps -o pid,%mem,command ax | grep pulseaudio
 1811  0.0 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no
 7363  0.0 grep pulseaudio
20428  0.0 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog

So maybe everything is just fine..? :)