High Memory Usage after Skipping Tracks Crashes the Music Assistant HAOS Plugin

[cbmiller2610]

What version of Music Assistant has the issue?

2.7.6

How is the MA server installed?

Home Assistant OS Addon

Mandatory: Carefully read the Troubleshooting FAQ and confirm that

• I have examined the logs and tried to resolve this issue
• I have fixed any errors in the logs that relate to tags
• I am not running MA across a VPN, VLAN, subnet, behind a firewall, or using local SSL or have any other complex network setup
• I am not using or have disabled tools such as AdGuard, Pi-hole or pfSense and retested
• I have checked my network setup to ensure mDNS/multicast is not being blocked
• I have reviewed the Open and Closed Issues and Discussions to resolve this yourself?
• I have reviewed the applicable player or music provider documentation
• I have reviewed the MA Status Page
• I have tried restarting MA and rebooting the host

As Applicable: Carefully read the Troubleshooting FAQ and confirm that

• If using HA, I have confirmed the internal URL is set correctly
• I have tried a wired connection for issues related to interrupted or poor playback quality
• If the problem relates to a device then I have checked the device settings
• If it is a frontend issue, I have tried a different widely used browser
• For voice problems, I have sought help elsewhere before returning here
• For playback problems, I have recycled power to the physical device

The problem

Skipping through tracks quickly increases memory usage

How to reproduce

HAOS Proxmox VM, 2VCPU, 4GB RAM. Normal RAM usage <2GB RAM

Skip through tracks (I have tried an album of .wav files, and mp3 files in local network library)
Observe that VM memory usage will quickly increase, skipping through 15-20 songs quickly got me to 95% memory usage in the VM.

Music Providers

Local provider (folder shared over SMB)

Player Providers

Browser web player via the Music Assistant Add on in HAOS Dashboard
Music Assistant Android app (I know it's still very WIP, but I confirmed the issue was not only with Android)

Full log output

music-assistant.log

Additional information

N/A

What version of Home Assistant Core (if used) are your running

2026.1.3

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant OS

On what type of hardware are you running?

Proxmox

Have you included ALL of the information specified in the Troubleshooting FAQ or explained why you cannot

• Yes

[OzGav]

And then what happened? Did the server crash? If not then may not be a problem. How are you determining the RAM usage?

[MarvinSchenkel]

Also, what do you see when you go to:
Settings > System > Streams > Allow (in memory) buffering of track audio. Is this checked or unchecked?

[cbmiller2610]

Apologies for the delay, and for omitting what the result was after the high memory usage... this is what I get for submitting late night issues.

The result of the high memory usage is that eventually the Music Assistant HAOS Plugin will crash and restart. At least some players (like the local player of the WIP MA Android app) cannot reconnect gracefully after this happens, and need to be quit and restarted.

Here is an image from within the HAOS Hardware graphs of CPU and memory, showing the memory usage growing when skipping tracks, and the drop when the Plugin crashes.

[cbmiller2610]

Also, what do you see when you go to: Settings > System > Streams > Allow (in memory) buffering of track audio. Is this checked or unchecked?

This option is checked, I cannot remember whether I changed it when I set up the Plugin.

[MarvinSchenkel]

It is only recommended to enable that option with a decent amount (8GB+) of memory. If you are running HA and MA on the same host with 4GB of RAM (minimum recommended requiremenets), enabling this option is not recommended. Can you try disabling this and see if that helps?

[cbmiller2610]

Ok so I will agree that there is a different behavior when the VM is allocated 8GB RAM. When it's allocated 4GB, skipping tracks ("reasonable" pace, once every couple seconds) will grow memory somewhat linearly until the plugin crashes. When the VM is allocated 8GB RAM, skipping tracks at the same rate will grow memory to around 5.5/6GB, and then it seems like the plugin will start to do some memory management and it will plateau.

HOWEVER, and this may be an edge case, but rapidly (once every second or more) skipping tracks will still crash the plugin with 8GB RAM.

Personally I think that there is very little reason why the plugin is caching more than a GB+ of songs without doing memory management in the first place. That seems to have very little utility, and just wastes system resources.

This feature is overall a good feature, I just think that it probably makes sense to only cache a couple of songs in front of and behind the current song.

[MarvinSchenkel]

I agree, we should guard for this. Can you confirm you do not see this behavior of increasing memory when you disable that "allow memory buffering" setting?