gnome-software starts very early in the session, slowing down boot

[Martin Pitt]

In a standard 16.04 desktop installation, gnome-software starts very early with the session, taking quite some amount of CPU and I/O, thus slowing down session startup:

  http://people.canonical.com/~pitti/tmp/bootchart-xenial-qemu.svg

There should be no reason at all to start it that early. Checking for updates can be delayed for a few minutes, or preferably the check for available updates should be made much cheaper by checking whether the existing apt cron job/update-motd stamps for "updates available" exists.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

The other issue is that this is quite an expensive process and it should not run all the time.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This is also related to the two-second "fwupd" process that runs during early session startup. Can we make this more efficient, like /etc/cron.weekly/?

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

And because it runs all the time, we get issues like bug 1594080. It also worsens bugs like bug 1575426 where a user attempts to work around the issue by restarting the Software app (only it's not actually restarted because the process never stopped running).

Now that gnome-software's update notifier has been disabled [1], is there any reason gnome-software needs a background service anyway? packagekit or whatever can finish installing or removing an app in the background without gnome-software needing to still be running for that, right?

[1] bug 1592382 since Ubuntu is currently better off using update-manager instead
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-software/3.20.1+git20160617.1.0440874.ubuntu-xenial-0ubuntu1

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

See also bug 1594085, complaining about the Software app being slow to start working well if it hasn't had a chance to warm up first.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jugurtha Hadjar (jugurtha-hadjar)]

This also affects me.

uname -a:

Linux XXXXX 4.8.0-30-generic #32-Ubuntu SMP Fri Dec 2 03:43:33 UTC 2016 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux

systemd-analyze:

Startup finished in 11.337s (kernel) + 2min 38.825s (userspace) = 2min 50.163s

Additional information to remove if deemed irrelevant:
- network interface isn't always brought up, so there might be something there.
- tracker (miner, store, etc) processes also hoard resources in the same manner (IO and CPU).
- frequent crashes I have yet to determine the cause of.

[林博仁(Buo-ren, Lin) (buo-ren-lin)]

Maybe the wrong place to ask, but why does the `fwupd` process has to stay in background (IMO) all the time?

``````
$ ps aux | grep fwupd
root 3260 0.3 0.4 694272 32924 ? Sl 00:35 0:01 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/fwupd/fwupd
``````

All fwupd*.service unit are claimed by `systemctl status` as "inactive (dead)"

```
$ systemctl status fwupd.service
● fwupd.service - Firmware update daemon
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/fwupd.service; static; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)
```