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I've noticed that rhythmbox-scope for unity-hud's music-lens is taking something above 18% of my memory all the time without doing anything useful.

Actually using it for searching music doesn't change the consumption rate in any way. It's rock steady at 18,xx %, thus making it the worst memory eater on my entire system.

I'm using a Samsung R710 notebook with 4GB ram (which should be enough IMHO) with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Any suggestions on how to lower this memory usage other than uninstalling the music-lens or rhythmbox-scope would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any useful answer!

BTW: Rhythmbox itself is quite memory hungry as well, making it choke every now and then on title change. Perhaps this is somehow related?

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How many songs are in your Rhythmbox database? If you kill rhythmbox scope, does it still use the same amount of memory when it restarts? To kill it, end the 'rhythmbox-scope' scope (or 'unity-scope-rhythmbox' depending on the version you're using) with the System Monitor. It will restart when you activate the lens again. – Teester Jun 7 '12 at 12:18
Thank you for your answer, Teester! The Database roughly contains about 34k songs. Rhythmbox-scope always uses 18,xx% memory, regardless what I do or if it was being restarted or anything. – FuzzyQ Jun 7 '12 at 13:39

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

If you are using rhythmbox-scope from https://launchpad.net/~markjtully/+archive/ppa, then you may be using something you do not actually require. The main music lens includes support for rhythmbox by default in 12.04.

rhythmbox-scope may be removed from your system using the Software Centre, or by entering

sudo apt-get remove rhythmbox-scope

Log out and log back in again to complete the process. You should still be able to search your music using the music lens's included rhythmbox support, hopefully with lower memory usage (look for unity-music-daemon in System Monitor).

rhythmbox-scope is a holdover from Ubuntu 11.10 (where it was required to search Rhythmbox) and the early development of Ubuntu 12.04, before it was included in the main music lens by default, rewritten using vala rather than python. I suspect it uses so much memory because it maintained its own list of music in memory (though 700-800 Mb still seems excessive, even for 34,000 songs). It may also be conflicting with the main music lens (as both are essentially trying to do the same thing). I have stopped development of this scope of this scope since it is now redundant. I really should also remove it from my ppa.

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Thanks again for your help. I did as you suggested, but now I seem to have a bug. Although unity-music-daemon is running when activating the music-lens in hud, there are no results shown in hud. It simply remains empty. Perhaps this is related to bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-lens-music/+bug/937238 ? – FuzzyQ Jun 8 '12 at 12:00
After several reboots and virtually hours of letting the unity-music-daemon do it's work, I've finally full search capabilities with my music-lens. Thank you, Teester! – FuzzyQ Jun 9 '12 at 8:51

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