I see with iotop that gnome-software --gapplication-service does a lot of io, which annoys me, since this makes my laptop nearly unusable.
I see with ls -l /proc/PID/fd that there a lot of open files (more then 100).
Is there a way to reduce the load of it?
the classic way to reduce its impact would be to use nice , this allows you to configure the application to be more or less of a resource hog.
nice is for cpu usage, you run it with a privelege number and a command e.g.
nice 10 /usr/loca/bin/my-service
numbers range from minus 19 which is almost never run to positive 20 which is almost exclusive. The default is 0.
ionice does similar but for I/O resources (e.g. disks) and can be run in a similar way but has more options
to choose the scheduling algorithm
-c 0: none, 1: realtime, 2: best-effort, 3: idle
to choose the priority
-p 1-7 (realtime or best-effort classes only)
you can either start the process through it like nice or effect a running process by specifying its PID with -P. Nice has renice for altering running processes.
I would experiment with values for ionice by running it against an already running PID, then when you have the right values edit the script that starts gnome-software to do so via ionice and or nice if required.
To re-ionice your gnome-software process to priority 4 copy and run the following command line: (note the ` backtick is not a quote, its to the left of the one)
ionice -p `ps ax | grep gnome-software | cut -f2 -d' ' | cut -f1 -d$'\n' ` -n 4
if you want to see what your priority is just run the same command but remove the -n 4 and it will tell you. Everything in the backticks is executed and the result is dropped into the ionice command in its place just before its run , its fetching the process id of the first gnome-software process it can find.
