Pamac is rapidly filling RAM

[MrDaisyBates]

Behavior

Any time Pamac checks for updates, it gets hung at 90%, my hard disk light on my tower lights up solid, and my RAM (16gb) rapidly fills and then it starts filling my swap (40gb) until the computer is basically unusable.

Details

I then kill it and it comes back down. I tried opening Octopi (which seems to open Pamac also because I noticed Pamac was back running) and I ended up with the same situation. I originally discovered it when I booted my system and the automatic “check for updates” crashed it.

I am not savvy with this stuff, but I assumed maybe Pamac wasn’t the problem but instead something it was trying to update was? I have no idea obviously so don’t take that comment too seriously.

I tried disabling AUR support in Pamac to see if that made a difference. It didn’t seem to.

Because I have Octopi installed, I opened the Octopi Cache Cleaner and used it for good measure. No change in behavior.

Any help is much appreciated. Thank you guys so much in advance.

[scotty65]

Try this fix:

Pamac eating all the RAM

pamac clean -b sudo pacman -Scc sudo pacman-mirrors -f && sudo pacman -Syu pamac update --force-refresh

pamac clean -b 
sudo pacman -Scc
sudo pacman-mirrors -f && sudo pacman -Syu
pamac update --force-refresh

[papajoke]

@MrDaisyBates

I tried disabling AUR support in Pacman to see

You use pacman or pamac ???

[mithrial]

From past experience and reports, this is caused by parsing the large AUR database. Disabling AUR should solve the problem.

[MrDaisyBates]

You are indeed correct. Pamac. I had it in my head as “Package Manager” and didn’t look that closely. I have edited my post to Pamac. That also explains why I couldn’t find anything when I searched the forum for preexisting tickets on the same issue! Thanks for pointing it out.

[MrDaisyBates]

Hey, @scotty65 Thanks for the reply!

This didn’t seem to fix it, but it might have spotlighted the issue.

That just keeps running at the precise moment my ram is filling up.

[MrDaisyBates]

Actually, it DID end up solving it. The screenshot I just sent, it got hung up on that third line of command, so I had to kill it. But I opened a new terminal and ran the last line of command you gave and it seems now to not be getting hung up (for the moment at least…not understanding what caused it personally). It is allowing me to update things.

I think I didn’t find this answer myself when I searched for it since I mistakenly said “Pacman” instead of “Pamac.”

I appreciate your time and knowledge, bud.

[MrDaisyBates]

I really appreciate this, @mithrial and I will keep this in mind if I run into future issues!

[Teo]

As a side note, look at the forum/wiki how to merge pacnew files, because it seems you have not done it so far (you still have the community repo). If something is not clear, open a new topic (but if you search you will probably find enough old ones) before touching anything in passwd for example.