gnome-software using hundreds of MB of memory when not in use

Dear All,

being a newbie I do not know whether I should start a new bug report, or it is fine to comment here. In my case gnome-software uses 27.6 GiB after leaving the computer untouched for overnight.
Same version of gnome-software. Please find system monitor screenshot attached.

The memory leak is not just a standby problem. The process eats as much memory as it can. On my 12GB system it was using 9.1GB of RSS and slowing it down. I am always forced to kill the process

I'm also experiencing this bug on 17.04

I'm experiencing this bug too.

Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

+1 on 17.04 (and also it eats my swap)

After updating to 17.10 Gnome is now constantly growing to > 12Gb RAM overnight with nothing running. (16Gb system) Under heavy use, memory usage quickly jumps to 14Gb and starts to eat up to 15Gb of Swap. Minimal system mods. Only Firefox running 95% of the time.

I do not seem to have the memory leak problem (the used RAM doesn't seem to grow constantly and without bounds), but still it uses constantly almost 200 MB of memory, which seems kind of unacceptable to me for an application which is usually run rarely or not at all for people who prefer using apt. I get that terminal users should not be the main concern of the OS/DE developers, but still, an option to disable the gnome-software autostart would be nice.

Even on a desktop, gnome-software not running all the time makes hardly a distinction. Searches for software may take a second longer (probably gnome-software startup time), still it works perfectly fine.

One can try this by killing gnome-software, then searching for something using the activities menu. This starts up gnome-software fully automatic. But it's not terminated after the search is done, which is certainly part of the problem.

Same problem on 17.10. Memory consumption of gnome-software seems to be stable most of the time (around 56MB). Sometimes it starts consuming the whole available memory, including the swap.

I'm also affected by this bug. Sometimes it starts consuming memory (I have 8GB, usually 6GB free) and devours swap as well. Only solution then is to do a hard restart, which can be problematic if I have a simulation running.

Just happened to me, too (17.10 x64). RAM usage got up, system became sluggish then stopped responding completely, only MagicSysRQ got me out. After restart, the problem has left an ugly gift: syslog has grown to 6,4 GB (I won't upload that). tail syslog (repeating for at least last 100 lines):

Jan 9 01:28:43 Comp gnome-software[1909]: Ignoring unexpected response
Jan 9 01:28:43 Comp gnome-software[1909]: g_byte_array_remove_range: assertion 'index_ + length <= array->len' failed

Sometimes, the error messages overlapped, don't know if this is normal:

Jan 9 01:36:59 Comp gnome-sofJan 9 01:37:49 Comp gnome-software[1909]: g_byte_array_remove_range: assertion 'index_ + length <= array->len' failed

I found a second bug report (#1716579) which seems to describe the same problem as this report.

I have 2 computers with Ubuntu 17.10 and both have the same issue: somehow it happens, that gnome-software occupies all spare memory, I've just killed the gnome-software process, because it occupied 9,1Gb out of 16Gb of my ram.

explain yourselves Ubuntu

> explain yourselves Ubuntu

Never seen Ubuntu explaining anything, helping people with debugging or something like this in the last five years. Eventually the problem will go away some way or another, but even this event most likely won't get reported. So, don't expect too much.

That said, clicking on "This bug affects xxx people, but not you" just under the bug title and adding one selfs to the list of affected people raises bug "heat", which I believe does make a distinction.

My version of 17.10 is also affected.

Happens very occasionally, unless I start chrome browser, than it will happen most certainly.

Same syslog as matlu described earlier
>> Ignoring unexpected response
>> g_byte_array_remove_range: assertion 'index_ + length <= array->len' failed

Seems that it is could be a duplicated of #1723362

+1 on 18.04

Still 197MB, not used, fresh after boot-up, on 18.04.

Left the computer running overnight with locked screen and in the morning, gnome-software is using 3 GB of RAM.

Still affecting gnome-software 3.36.0-0ubuntu3 in Focal.

The gnome-software background process consumes 600 MB of memory after 6 days uptime.

I can confirm that this is still happening in 3.36.3 focal fossa.

I'm writing about this problem in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/191
I think that it's a social and environmental responsibility to try to make software use a reasonable amount of resources. Unjustified computer renewal is a social and environmental problem.

I also can confirm that this issue persists in Ubuntu 20.04 (focal). It's pretty irritating... it's bad enough that all of these Electron-based apps and chromium-based browsers are chewing up ~400-500Mb each. I don't need a silly software management UI doing it, too!

I recognize that gnome-software may not be a default-installed package on Ubuntu 20.04, but it
still is widely used (I have several Flatpaks I need for work, and gnome-software offers the ability to easily install and coordinate their updates). Can't some developers at Red Hat and Canonical put their heads together for a few minutes and get this corrected, please?

I also will second Meluco's comment. We should not all have to buy new 32Gb laptops just to run a simple productivity workstation.

This really needs to get corrected. I am seeing reports of memory leaks in gnome-software going back as far as Ubuntu 16.04.

I also confirm in 20.04. I have to kill it every day just to release leaked(?) memory.

yes also 20.04 starts at 50-60 MB grows to 600 MB in a couple of hours, is there a workaround? e.g. kill every hour?

Ubuntu 23.10 still has this problem. Without actually using the app I saw an RSS of 600MB on my AMD64 desktop, measured using `sudo smem -tk`. After a reboot (still without opening the app manually) I see a steady 300MB RSS.

It's the heaviest app in use on my desktop after Firefox.

While keeping Flatpaks and Snaps up-to-date is great, perhaps it could exit after having done that?