Bug#974186: /usr/bin/gnome-software: gnome-software uses way too much memory

[Julien Cristau]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 04:12:30PM +1100, Timothy Allen wrote:
> Thank you for working on keeping GNOME packages up-to-date in Debian, and thank
> you in particular for packaging GNOME Software, which makes it easy to keep on
> top of package updates, especially for Testing where they happen regularly.
> 
> I have a low-end laptop with 2GB of RAM, and I usually run GNOME 3 because it's
> highly polished and light-weight enough that I can still run a browser and a
> few terminals to get work done. The one exception is gnome-software, which
> frequently claims 15% or more of my RAM whenever it checks for updates. Right
> now, it's sitting at ~18%, or 335MB resident — that may not be much on other
> computers, but for my little laptop it's often enough to get my browser OOM-
> killed while I'm in the middle of something.
> 
> Is there some way I can make GNOME Software stop checking for updates, or at
> least stop holding (presumably) the entire package list in memory after the
> update-check is complete?
> 
> From GNOME Software's hamburger menu, I picked "Update Preferences" and
> disabled "Automatic Updates" and "Automatic Update Notifications", but that
> doesn't seem to stop it from checking for updates (what seems like) every time
> I wake my laptop up.
> 
> I also went into the "Software & Updates" application, and set "Automatically
> check for updates" to "Never". Still no change.
> 
> Previously, I've just sent the gnome-software process a SIGTERM and that
> cleaned it up until the next time I logged in, but more recently it's been
> automatically restarted.
> 
I'm also noticing gnome-software taking up way too much memory, while
not doing anything.  2GB resident seems unreasonable, so this isn't
limited to low-end hardware.

USER         PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
jcristau   42111  0.0 11.9 4077948 1927496 ?     Sl    2020  12:29 /usr/bin/gnome-software --gapplication-service

Cheers,
Julien