Preventing proliferation of dbus-daemon instances

I was reading on the Internet, someone reporting hundreds of dbus-daemon instances, and impacting on system performance. I was googling this topic, as was having a problem with some AppImages and Flatpaks not working with dbus.

Guitar is an AppImage that does work with dbus. As they are setup to run as a unique user, a session dbus-daemon has to be launched for each user. Problem is, after quiting Guitar, the daemons are still running:

# ps | grep dbus
 2082 root      0:00 {rc.services_ipc} /bin/ash /etc/rc.d/rc.services_ipc bluetoothhw:dbus bluetooth:bluealsa
 3954 messageb  0:01 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system
 4302 root      0:00 dbus-launch --autolaunch=9e2323c574f908750e4a3dbd642226f0 --binary-syntax --close-stderr
 4303 root      0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --syslog-only --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
26521 root      0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --syslog --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
32497 guitar    0:00 dbus-launch --autolaunch 9e2323c574f908750e4a3dbd642226f0 --binary-syntax --close-stderr
32498 guitar    0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --syslog-only --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session

This is the problem that people are reporting; instances starting then never terminating. I haven't studied the topic enough to determine why some people are getting a huge number of instances.

DeltaChat is an AppImage that reports unable to connect to the dbus. I seem to have found a solution so it does connect, and also the dbus-daemon instance terminates after the app has exited. This is /usr/bin/deltachat.bin:

#!/bin/sh
export $(dbus-launch)
/mnt/wkg/appimage/deltachat/deltachat-1.34.4.AppImage
kill $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID

Previously, had a symlink /usr/bin/deltachat.bin to the AppImage, now it is a script. The script runs as the user "deltachat" and the first line in the script provides the information that the AppImage needs to access dbus. The last line kills the dbus-daemon instance.

After starting DeltaChat:

# ps | grep dbus
 2082 root      0:00 {rc.services_ipc} /bin/ash /etc/rc.d/rc.services_ipc bluetoothhw:dbus bluetooth:bluealsa
 2223 deltacha  0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --syslog --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
 3954 messageb  0:01 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system
 4302 root      0:00 dbus-launch --autolaunch=9e2323c574f908750e4a3dbd642226f0 --binary-syntax --close-stderr
 4303 root      0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --syslog-only --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
26521 root      0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --syslog --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
32497 guitar    0:00 dbus-launch --autolaunch 9e2323c574f908750e4a3dbd642226f0 --binary-syntax --close-stderr
32498 guitar    0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --syslog-only --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session

Then after quiting DeltaChat, that highlighted line is gone.

This is the fix I remembered last night, then forgot in the morning. The memory came back later. Most importantly, start 'deltachat' in a terminal, it no longer reports unable to connect to dbus.

Both the AppImage Installer (appi) and the Flatpak Installer (Flapi) have this fix.    

Tags: easy