Memory consumption is too high and never stops

[michalzkosmosu]

I love elementary OS, but it still needs a lot of optimization.

I restarted my laptop at 12:30. I haven't clicked anything for 10 minutes. Then I ran the Optimizer app to check memory usage and LibreOffice Writer to write down observations.

There are some AppCenter processes that run in the background all the time and consume far too much memory. Time passes, but memory consumption does not decrease, just stands still or increases. I haven't started the AppCenter since rebooting. There are no pending updates.

12:41 213 MiB – io.elementary.appcenter -s 90 MiB – pantheon-mail --hiden 85 MiB – LibreOffice Writer opened with short text document (flatpak)

12:43 213 MiB – io.elementary.appcenter -s 130 MiB – pantheon-mail --hiden 85 MiB – LibreOffice Writer opened with short text document (flatpak)

12:44 91213 MiB – io.elementary.appcenter -s 155 MiB – pantheon-mail --hiden 85 MiB – LibreOffice Writer opened with short text document (flatpak)

12:48 216 MiB – io.elementary.appcenter -s 191 MiB – pantheon-mail –hiden 86 MiB – LibreOffice Writer opened with short text document (flatpak)

13:26 217 MiB – io.elementary.appcenter -s 203 MiB – pantheon-mail –hiden 90 MiB – LibreOffice Writer opened with short text document (flatpak)

13:41 217 MiB – io.elementary.appcenter -s 203 MiB – pantheon-mail –hiden 92 MiB – LibreOffice Writer opened with short text document (flatpak)

Another thing is the memory consumption by the mail client. I have enabled checking for new emails even with the app closed, so I understand why this process is there, but I think we'll all agree that 100-200 MiB is very high consumption for such a process. The LibreOffice where I write these conclusions consumes at the moment about 92 MiB.

[Scotty-Trees]

My comment from a more recent post, having the same issue as well. Just wanted to bring it to people's attention and hope for a fix!

https://github.com/elementary/appcenter/issues/1389#issuecomment-704602799

[edunfelt]

I also have this issue on my install of Pop_OS 20.04. Memory consumption keeps increasing even after the App Center has been closed, however this is not noticeable unless the app has been opened in the first place.

[danirabbit]

Please don't make "me too" comments unless you have additional information that could help find the source of the issue. Instead you can use the 👍 reaction to the original report

[cassidyjames]

@davidmhewitt what are your thoughts on this? To me, a couple hundred MB to keep the app store running in the background doesn't sound totally unreasonable, but I'm not sure if there's more we could do here to free up memory when the window is closed.

[davidmhewitt]

From looking at it in the past, I think most of the memory usage is what's used to hold the package cache in RAM. It takes a while to load/generate, so if we dump that out of RAM then it'll take a lot longer for the AppCenter window to be ready for use each time you open it.

There are probably some improvements that could be made. But it's not going to be a magic 90% reduction or something.

[ids1024]

so if we dump that out of RAM then it'll take a lot longer for the AppCenter window to be ready for use each time you open it.

I'm not familiar with the format of the package cache or how it's used, but would it be feasible to use an on-disk SQLite database? If it fits well with how the cache is used, that could allow fast queries without loading the whole thing into RAM.

[AGhost-7]

Hello, I am a software developer using popos and I noticed this application is eating up 1.4gb of ram on my computer. From my perspective, I don't really open the appcenter often enough to care about the loading times. 1.4gb of ram usage on the other hand is a pretty big penalty.

[malachibazar]

@AGhost-7 Same for me. I'm also running on Pop OS and the appcenter is consistently using more than 500 MB without even opening it.

[cassidyjames]

Note that Pop!_Shop is 300 commits and at least 6 months behind AppCenter, with several more commits from AppCenter reverted. It's not really helpful to report issues with Pop!_Shop here because of how far it's diverged.

[AGhost-7]

Are you suggesting that it is fixed in elementary?

[cassidyjames]

@AGhost-7 I'm pointing out that coming the the elementary AppCenter issue tracker with issues in Pop!_Shop is futile at the moment, because their codebase has diverged so far it's impossible to tell if you're hitting the same issue. There have been several performance fixes and general code cleanups since Pop!_Shop forked, so you would need to see if you are able to reproduce the same issue with your setup in AppCenter to see.

[AGhost-7]

It appears that users are being directed to this repo by the pop team. I think there might be a communication issue between pop and elementary maintainers.

[danirabbit]

@AGhost-7 @malachibazar

Pop!_Shop has diverged so far from AppCenter at this point that it's not meaningfully the same application anymore. Only issues experienced in AppCenter should be reported here

[gene1wood]

@cassidyjames It sounds like from pop-os/shop#257 the memory usage issue is an upstream problem here in elementary/appcenter, but from what @AGhost-7 is saying above, maybe this isn't the case?

It's not possible to comment in pop-os/shop#257 because it was closed due to an abusive commenter. Any recommendations how to determine if indeed this problem is one that needs to be fixed here in elementary/appcenter or if it's something that needs to be fixed in Pop! ?

I'm only curious as I'm experiencing the same issue in my Pop! 22.04 with io.elementary.appcenter -s using 1GB of memory

[Slater91]

I just had to strike down the AppCenter process as it was eating 934 MB of RAM a few hours after booting and without ever actually opening the application. I am using elementary OS 7.1 with all the latest updates applied as of today, so this is not a case of old software or a different platform.