Hello.
Ran into this myself. My system was slow and my RAM completely consumed. Finally realized it was nvidia-smi; another tool was calling it in a loop and causing RAM to flood.
To verify, I made sure the looping tool was dead, then ran nvidia-smi directly, and watched the RAM get consumed.
Wanna watch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU1gfNk4kH0
Best part (not shown): subsequent runs don’t use whatever nvidia-smi cached; it starts fresh, pegging a CPU core to fill all RAM.
zoey@Clippy:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 24.10
Release: 24.10
Codename: oracular
zoey@Clippy:~$ nvidia-smi
Thu Oct 10 22:08:23 2024
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 560.35.03 Driver Version: 560.35.03 CUDA Version: 12.6 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| 0% 51C P8 21W / 350W | 75MiB / 24576MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 118489 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 68MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Running sudo chmod o-w /var/run/nvidia-persistenced/socket as suggested by developer.nvidia.com26 above makes nvidia-smi instantly respond without consuming everything in sight. However, I severely dislike magical fixes and would love something that doesn’t require me to fiddle with files like this to work around bugs.