Why is DiscoverNotifier using so much ram?

moschlegbz · December 28, 2025, 10:48pm

I manually run the Discover icon from my taskbar, I don’t really want DiscoverNotifier to be running at all. I ran my Discover today and noticed DiscoverNotifier was running even after I exited Discover..so acting like a daemon or service. So how can I prevent DiscoverNotifier from running at all?

I decided to remove the package, I did so and it went away with no complaints about deps (OS is Fedora)

sudo dnf rm plasma-discover-notifier
Package                                                          Arch           Version                                                          Repository                               Size
Removing:
plasma-discover-notifier                                        x86_64         6.5.4-1.fc43                                                     updates                             329.4 KiB

Transaction Summary:
Removing:           1 package

Also, I noticed from “smem” that it uses a lot of memory, why?

smem

PID User     Command                         Swap      USS      PSS      RSS
2631 mos      /usr/libexec/DiscoverNotifi        0    60980    67489   149840  
15566 mos      /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox         0   107884   121458   202788  
15642 mos      /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox         0   146708   167891   262544  
15296 mos      /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox         0   276864   307358   445864  
 2197 mos      /usr/bin/plasmashell --no-r        0   288560   317630   443936

That seems like a lot of ram for just a daemon that notifies the user of discover updates. It won’t affect me since I’ve now removed the entire package but I was just wondering.

wojtek · June 19, 2026, 5:57pm

I was just checking memory usage aand noticed the same thing – it takes 50% more memory than plasmashell, which is just super odd…

There is another, older topic about that (Plasma Discover Update Notifier's memory usage is >200MB) but none was answered…

Sadi · June 21, 2026, 10:35am

I have it running under Debian 14 KDE Plasma 6.6.5 with about 20 MB memory usage.
An extraordinary memory usage needs some troubleshooting work to find out what is causing it (a distro-specific packaging issue, etc.).
It’s triggered via “/etc/xdg/autostart/org.kde.discover.notifier.desktop”, so can be disabled and enabled without uninstalling, if desired.
One can also opt for any other method of automated software update notifications (e.g. to handle updates via custom shell scripts etc.), or none at all (to handle updates manually).

northwind · August 12, 2026, 9:22am

Same problem here with a lot of memory usage (max seen so far: 800MB) - is there anything I can do to track this down?

Operating System: Kubuntu 26.04 LTS
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.24.0
Qt Version: 6.10.2
Kernel Version: 7.0.0-28-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 20 × Intel® Core™ i5-14600K
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15,4 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® Graphics
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: B760 GAMING X AX

$ smem -a -P discover
   PID User Command                                         Swap    USS    PSS    RSS 
132245 xx  /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/smem -a -P discover      0  13140  14710  21124 
  2774 xx  /usr/bin/plasma-discover                      481496 368064 377177 501288

meven · August 12, 2026, 9:32am

Could you give details, with those commands, whete 2631 is the pid of the DiscoverNotifier

cat /proc/2631/smaps_rollup
awk '/^Anonymous:/ {a+=$2} END {print a" KB anonymous"}' /proc/2631/smaps
pmap -X 2631 | grep -iE 'swcatalog|appstream|\.xb'

meven · August 12, 2026, 10:00am

Seems reported with bug 509180

M.Karrde · August 12, 2026, 10:25am

With currently no updates available it is 17 to 20 MiB for me but, as I watched it at the system monitor for a few minutes, it jumps up to roughly 260 MiB every now and then for a very short amount of time and then back to the range I mentioned first.

northwind · August 12, 2026, 4:10pm

$ smem -a -P discover
   PID User Command                                       Swap    USS    PSS     RSS 

133201 xxx  /usr/bin/plasma-discover                         0 969576 983503 1121564 

$ cat /proc/133201/smaps_rollup
awk '/^Anonymous:/ {a+=$2} END {print a" KB anonymous"}' /proc/133201/smaps
pmap -X 133201 | grep -iE 'swcatalog|appstream|\.xb'
610342b62000-7ffdcf905000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0                          [rollup]
Rss:             1121564 kB
Pss:              984320 kB
Pss_Dirty:        930932 kB
Pss_Anon:         930932 kB
Pss_File:          53388 kB
Pss_Shmem:             0 kB
Shared_Clean:     151980 kB
Shared_Dirty:          8 kB
Private_Clean:     38644 kB
Private_Dirty:    930932 kB
Referenced:      1085504 kB
Anonymous:        930932 kB
KSM:                   0 kB
LazyFree:              0 kB
AnonHugePages:         0 kB
ShmemPmdMapped:        0 kB
FilePmdMapped:         0 kB
Shared_Hugetlb:        0 kB
Private_Hugetlb:       0 kB
Swap:                  0 kB
SwapPss:               0 kB
Locked:                0 kB
930932 KB anonymous
    793342355000 r--p  00000000  fc:00 23593088     684     676    676         0        620         0   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 en-US-local-metainfo.xb
    793342400000 r--p  00000000  fc:00 23604684    9328    9300   9300         0       9104         0   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 en-US-os-catalog.xb (deleted)
    79338734f000 r--p  00000000  fc:00   529975     164     164     32         0        164         0   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libappstream.so.1.1.2
    793387378000 r-xp  00029000  fc:00   529975     308     284    127         0        284         0   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libappstream.so.1.1.2
    7933873c5000 r--p  00076000  fc:00   529975     176     172     56         0        172         0   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libappstream.so.1.1.2
    7933873f1000 r--p  000a1000  fc:00   529975      44      44     44        44         44        44   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libappstream.so.1.1.2
    7933873fc000 rw-p  000ac000  fc:00   529975      12      12     12        12         12        12   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libappstream.so.1.1.2
    79338a05b000 r--p  00000000  fc:00   532271     176     100     67         0          0         0   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libAppStreamQt.so.1.1.2
    79338a087000 r-xp  0002c000  fc:00   532271     224     212     90         0         48         0   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libAppStreamQt.so.1.1.2
    79338a0bf000 r--p  00064000  fc:00   532271      84      80     23         0          0         0   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libAppStreamQt.so.1.1.2
    79338a0d4000 r--p  00078000  fc:00   532271      16      16     16        16         16        16   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libAppStreamQt.so.1.1.2
    79338a0d8000 rw-p  0007c000  fc:00   532271      12      12     12        12         12        12   0        0              0             0              0               0    0       0      0           0             0 libAppStreamQt.so.1.1.2

mook765 · August 12, 2026, 5:13pm

DiscoverNotifier is started through /etc/xdg/autostart/org.kde.discover.notifier.desktop.

If you don’t want to run DicoverNotifier at all, simply remove that file. You can undo this by copying back from /usr/share/applications/org.kde.discover.notifier.desktop.