Memory leak in Music Assistant 2.7.7, 2.7.8 with squeezelite player

[make-all]

What version of Music Assistant has the issue?

2.7.8

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 or warnings 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
• 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

After upgrading to MA 2.7.7 on Feb 13, my memory usage has increased at around 1GB/hr until the OOM killer kills the VM running Music Assistant. This occurs even when all players are idle.

After debugging the issue, I was able to isolate it to the squeezelite provider.

A fresh installation of MA 2.7.8 also shows the issue as soon as the squeezelite provider is added.

How to reproduce

1. Upgraded from 2.7.6 to 2.7.7

2. Install 2.7.8 from scratch.

• memory usage is stable.
• slowly introduce new providers
• on adding the squeezelite player, memory use starts increasing (though slower than originally observed, until a few tracks are played then the growth in memory use speeds up)

Music Providers

No music players seem involved. I have tried several as listed on my previous report, but it results in the automation tagging them on the bug, so have not listed here.

Player Providers

• squeezelite

Players that do not show the problem: Chromecast, Sendspin

Full log output

music-assistant.log

Additional information

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

2026.2.3

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant OS

On what type of hardware are you running?

Generic x86-64 (e.g. Intel NUC)

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

• Yes

[MarvinSchenkel]

What do you see when you go to: Settings > System > Streams > Allow (in memory) buffering of track audio. Is this checked or unchecked? It should be off by default if you are running on hardware with relatively low memory, but curious what this says

[make-all]

That option is currently off, but if buffering a couple of 3-5 minute long tracks is taking up 2.5 - 3GB of RAM, then that is also an issue.

The memory usage starts growing immediately after startup without playing anything also. I have to leave MA disabled when not in use, to avoid issues affecting HA.

[MarvinSchenkel]

Having a hard time trying to reproduce this. Could you maybe try this with our nightly builds? They contain a lot of changes and fixes that have not been deployed to 2.7.x.

So:

• Stop your MA addon
• Make sure you have ticked 'advanced settings' in your HA user profile
• Install the 'Music assistant nightly' from the store

Curious if you also observe this here

[Adunaphel]

I am experiencing similar issues, running the container as a Docker container on my host. If left to its own devices, it will start consuming all available RAM (13GB currently) after a few hours (4-5 is where I start noticing it). Configuration is:

• Deezer music provider
• Squeezelite player provider

When I constrain the RAM use of the container, it will just crash once it runs out of memory.
Running it as a HA add-on will make the memory balloon until HA restarts the container, which just keeps repeating every 2 hours.

Changing the buffering setting didn't change the memory ballooning.
Currently trying the nightly build to see if that changes anything.

[make-all]

I rebooted my piCorePlayer yesterday and the problem went away.

Maybe you can enable debug logging for the squeezelite provider first and collect some logs of what it is doing (I only got as far as INFO, and only the info in the log attached was showing).

Then check if restarting your squeezelite devices resolves the issue like it did for me.