Dear Maintainer,

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

I'd like to concur with this.  It would consume enough memory that my oomkiller would try to resolve. While this was happening the whole system would crawl, maybe up to 10 minutes.  I didn't track it enough to see what it was really doing. While I understand that 2GB (or more) isn't a huge deal, it's a lot of memory for something that's supposed to be running in the background, and not impactful to active users.

 I decided to chmod -x the binary to stop it from running. I tried to disable via dconf-editor, but didn't seem to be enough.

This might be related to
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14827 — connecting gdb
to an offending gnome-software process and calling malloc_trim(0)
releases a lot of memory; I went from

steve    2801906  0.1  3.4 2924988 1136840 ?     Sl   Oct02   6:32 /usr/bin/gnome-software --gapplication-service

to

steve    2801906  0.1  0.6 2908452 219416 ?      Sl   Oct02   6:32 /usr/bin/gnome-software --gapplication-service

Regards,

Stephen

This might be related to
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14827 — connecting gdb
to an offending gnome-software process and calling malloc_trim(0)
releases a lot of memory; I went from

steve    2801906  0.1  3.4 2924988 1136840 ?     Sl   Oct02   6:32 /usr/bin/gnome-software --gapplication-service

to

steve    2801906  0.1  0.6 2908452 219416 ?      Sl   Oct02   6:32 /usr/bin/gnome-software --gapplication-service

Regards,

Stephen