Hi!
I’m running a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with Raspbian bookworm and an overlay filesystem to avoid writes to the SD cards.
Configuration below:
Linux emon 6.6.74+rpt-rpi-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.6.74-1+rpt1 (2025-01-27) aarch64
tmpfs-root /media/root-rw tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0
overlayroot / overlay rw,relatime,lowerdir=/media/root-ro,upperdir=/media/root-rw/overlay,workdir=/media/root-rw/overlay-workdir/_,uuid=on 0 0
/dev/mmcblk0p2 /media/root-ro ext4 ro,relatime 0 0
The absolute minimum autostart config of labwc is running a chromium-browser in kiosk mode to show the dashboard in the image:
emon@emon:~ $ cat /etc/xdg/labwc/autostart
#/usr/bin/lwrespawn /usr/bin/pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi &
#/usr/bin/lwrespawn /usr/bin/wf-panel-pi &
/usr/bin/lwrespawn /usr/bin/chromium-browser "https://********" --kiosk --start-fullscreen --start-maximized --no-sandbox --no-first-run --noerrdialogs --disable-translate --disable-notifications --disable-infobars --disable-pinch --disable-features=TranslateUI --ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=OverlayScrollbar --overscroll-history-navigation=0 --disk-cache-dir=/dev/null --disk-cache-size=1 --disable-dev-shm-usage &
/usr/bin/lwrespawn /home/emon/hwmon.py &
/usr/bin/kanshi &
/usr/bin/lxsession-xdg-autostart
I enabled screen blanking using raspi-config to shutdown the DSI touchscreen screen after 10 minutes.
The issue I’m having with the setup is that the Raspi memory is filling up in a couple of hours and sometimes the system becomes unresponsive and needs a power cycle.
I added a monitoring script to the setup to record the memory usage and these are the results:
As you see the red line showing total memory usage has a sawtooth pattern, it drops every time I touch the screen to show the dashboard and then continuously increases when the screen goes to sleep again. The orange line is the /tmp folder and also that one is continuing to fill up as time passes.
It seems like the chromium renderer process is storing the undisplayed frames in memory for some reason.
I tried almost everything and currently the /tmp folder is mounted as an external USB drive to store the chromium temp files.
Do you have any suggestion on what is happening and how to solve this issue? The limited 1GB memory is fine as the system starts and for the few next hours and this random fill up is very annoying.
Thanks!