Fix pulseaudio Memory Leak

Have you ever opened your system monitor and found pulseaudio is utilizing huge amounts of RAM (physical memory), sometimes as much as 18% of the total physical memory.

High memory usage. Source https://www.middlewareinventory.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/kube-node-disk-usage.png

Unless you have explicitly allowed for such usage, even 100 megabytes (MB) of RAM is a lot for pulseaudio.

Now, I understand that pulseaudio can consume large amounts of virtual memory. If you need to reduce the virtual memory usage from pulseaudio, check out his forum:

How do I stop Pulseaudio using huge amounts of VIRTUAL memory?

However, if you have counterchecked your memory consumption and determined the high usage is on physical memory and not virtual memory, there is a solution.

I encountered high memory usage when playing audio from an android phone through a laptop using bluetooth on Wayland GNOME 43.

The solution that worked for me was disabling PulseAudio’s timer-based
scheduling by adding tsched=0 to the end of the load-module module-udev-detect line in /etc/pulse/default.pa.

load-module module-udev-detect line

Another solution (I have not tested this) is to reduce the number of channels that PulseAudio uses. You can do this by editing the /etc/pulse/daemon.conf file and changing the default-
fragments and default-fragment-size-msec values.

default-
fragments and default-fragment-size-msec values

Hope this helps!

Want to set a default output device on boot without the need to select one each time? Check out this tutorial.

Set Default Pulseaudio Output Device on Boot Linux