[Milhouse]

The memory leak fix that was included in yesterday's build solved the long-standing issue with the fast growing RAM usage of kodi.bin process.

Thanks for identifying the VDPAU/VAAPI leak!

However, I still think that there is a room for improvement. IMO the current default settings don't work quite well for systems that play video 24/7 and Kodi need to be restarted every now and then.

I think I found a couple of solutions to this problem.
Solution #1: MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=1 (or =2) in kodi.conf. This setting does not allow kodi.bin process to use (and never free) ungodly amounts of RAM over time.
Solution #2: Jemalloc. I built an image with Jemalloc 5.2.0 using this as a reference. The result is similar to decreasing MALLOC_ARENA_MAX.

I asked on the LibreELEC Slack if anyone had any thoughts on this suggestion, and it's been suggested that Python2 has heap fragmentation issues in which case moving to Python3 (which is scheduled to happen during Kodi 19 development) may help reduce fragmentation.

Personally, I'm not keen on using a different allocator - Jemalloc has been tested in the past without any noticeable improvement (otherwise we'd be using Jemalloc already). You should be able to manually set MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=# in /storage/.config/kodi.conf.

Since this is a development issue it would be best to continue any discussion in the LibreELEC forum.