(bold for fast reading)

I have a question about plasmashell. Since upgrading from KDE Neon 5.8.x LTS to 5.12.x LTS (I'm currently on version 5.12.1), plasmashell (so it seems) is hogging my memory into infinity ("and beyond!" ^^) until my system starts becoming unresponsive. This usually starts happening when I do not much more than watching videos for a while. KSysInfo shows my swap space 100% used (16 GB), and normal memory nearly full (11.7 GB).

When I kill and restart plasmashell, swap and memory values make a deep dive down to their original values (swap 0 GB, memory ~3.5 GB); all becomes normal again.

I have been investigating what causes this behavior since the new LTS release last week (or two?) but haven't found anything conclusive yet; nothing yet of which I can clearly state, when A then B; but I'll keep at it.

I've searched the forum prior to this writing and all I could find was this post: viewtopic.php?f=289&t=141530&p=380229
This post describes a problem similar to mine (although this could be misleading), and if that problem was not fixed it would coincide nicely with the fact that version 5.10.4 (from the post) lies between version numbers 5.8 and 5.12.. but.. this bug is reported as fixed.

Although I'm going to keep my eye out on what the problem might be, I would like to ask in advance: Is anyone experiencing the problem I am describing? (or am I the only one?)

I don't know the solution but you should look for example in KSysGuard and see what specific process cause the problem. And perhaps then report a bug report.

Thank you for replying.

When I mentioned 'plasmashell', I was actually talking about the process. Had some updates in the mean while, but none of the updates fixed the problem, so the problem still seems current.

Is there a way I can be more specific than the process name?
I do see plasmashell has a few child processes, which all seem to behave normally. But can I better analyze the plasmashell process?
Because I find my information is lacking much detail. I would not be able to tell a person what is going nor would I be able to finding the right technician to even tell it to

Sorry, I wasn't paying enough attention to details. Normally my plasmashell consumes about 208 MiB and 162 MiB of shared memory when I watch video on VLC, Dragon Player or SMplayer. I think you can report a bug. I would also check other video players and make sure all necessary codes are installed. I write it because there is no better answer to your problem and I am just guessing what I would check in this situation, to give more details to bug report, but I am not an expert.

It looks like some smart people are already on it
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368838