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rkeating
Asked: 2018-04-11 08:06:32 +0800 CST

Ubuntu 17.10 gnome-software process using large amounts of memory

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I've been running Ubuntu 17.10 for a good while. Starting yesterday (April 9) the process gnome-software started using large amounts of memory. I don't know if it is related to the update that I took that day.

gnome-software grows to use up to 7G of memory (my system has 8G of RAM.) This expands into eating up swap and root. My root usually runs at 51% of its total disk space and it went up to 96%. System ground to a halt. Had to power off. Only after some automatic disk cleaning (?) did root return to 51% usage on its own.

This happened twice yesterday and it is starting again today. After running only 1 hour gnome-software is now using (according to system monitor)
virtual mem=5.4G, Resident me=4.7G, memory=4.7G

More info:

This is continuing to happen. The root disk space is being used in at least the file /var/log/syslog. Over the last few hours it has grown to 4.9G in size. I have to manually kill the gnome-software process and delete the log file to keep the computer functional.

When gnome-software starts using memory, the CPU jumps up and down from 100% to 0%. This can be seen in the system monitor program in the resources tab. I verified this by stopping the gnome-software process and CPU usage goes to almost nothing. Telling the process to continue show CPU usage jumping all over again.

This CPU usage doesn't show up in "% CPU" on the process page. Probably due to the refresh interval?

Even more info:

This is the error that repeats over and over in /var/log/syslog when this is happening. syslog was 1.7G when I caught it this time.

Apr 10 20:27:31 rwkeating-XPS-8300 gnome-software[2485]: g_byte_array_remove_range: assertion 'index_ + length <= array->len' failed
Apr 10 20:27:31 rwkeating-XPS-8300 gnome-software[2485]: Ignoring unexpected response

I verified this by pausing the gnome-software process while doing a tail on syslog and then un-pausing the gnome-software process only to see the error flooding the log. So it is caught in this loop. Don't know what it means ... yet.

memory-usage ram gnome-software

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    THIS IS A REPORTED BUG --------------------- This URL point to the bug report

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-software/+bug/1723362

    If I am reading that correctly, it is fixed in 18.04. May have to upgrade before the official release data if I want to get any work done.

    In the comments in the above link, a solution was provided. I've been running this and have had no issues with the gnome-software process.

    sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/gnome-software

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

    Then reboot.

    I am marking this answered.

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