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nazar2sfive
Asked: 2016-05-20 19:23:16 +0800 CST

appstreamcli hanging with 100% CPU usage during update

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appstreamcli is overheating my laptop by constantly using 100% of a core. My only solution is to kill it. Here's a screenshot of top:

output of top showing appstreamcli with 100% cpu usage

I can kill appstreamcli with either sudo kill pid or sudo killall appstreamcli. But once I do sudo apt update, the appstreamcli process returns again and hangs the update. If I then kill it, I get the following output:

Reading package lists... Done
E: Problem executing scripts APT::Update::Post-Invoke-Success
'if /usr/bin/test -w /var/cache/app-info -a -e /usr/bin/appstreamcli;
 then appstreamcli refresh > /dev/null;
 fi'
E: Sub-process returned an error code

What is this process and why is it using so much CPU?

apt

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This is caused by a bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/appstream/+bug/1579712
    The working solution (just tried myself):

    First kill appstreamcli, either manually or with

    sudo kill -KILL $(pgrep appstreamcli)

    or

    sudo pkill -KILL appstreamcli

    Then:

    wget -P /tmp https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/appstream_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libappstream3_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i /tmp/appstream_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb /tmp/libappstream3_0.9.4-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb

    After this you will be able to proceed with apt-get update as usual

    • 79

  2. Alternatively for what ever reason, if you don't want to install an out of repo package and just wait for an update you can uninstall it completely.

    This will remove Discover on KDE:Plasma so I assume it will also remove the Gnome Software, or what ever your Ubuntu Flavor adds. If this is the case you can just use Muon on Kubuntu, or Synaptic on GTK based DEs.

    Before you run this make sure you check the packages being removed to make sure that is ok with you.

    You can figure out what something is by running

    apt show appstream

    to uninstall appstream run

    sudo apt remove appstream
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