Very disturbing (KDE and RH 8.0)
 

Heya,

This has been bugging me for a very long time, but I keep forgeting to bring it up.

My home machine (a stock RH 8.0 box, 2.4.20-18 kernel) is normally switched off at the end of the day, and then turned on again in the morning. However, when I leave it on overnight this is what happens:

I leave the machine in the desktop, with no programs running (everything is closed). GKrellm tells me that most of my mem is free, and I can confirm this when I do top.

However, when I wake up and want to do something, the mem is running EXTREMELY low, and the machine is slow as hell. I investigated a little, and found that the kdeinit processes have chowed HUGE amounts of memory, even though they are idle. Basically the kdeinit-kicker, kdeinit-desktop, and so on consume all the available memory, and nothing short of reboot fixes this.

Why is this happening? How do I stop it? Please don't tell me to switch to a WM instead of KDE, that's not the point, I want to know why do these processes consume so much memory when left alone?

Cheers!

Sounds like a possible memory leak. I use Gnome, so im not 100% sure but It sounds like a bug in KDE?

What happens if you just start using the machine instead of rebooting? Do the kdeinit processes cough up the memory? From reading around here, I've seen many references to the fact that Linux does NOT keep memory free, but rather uses it as much as possible.

If the KDEinit processes are locking up memory so other programs can't use it, then you have a problem, but if they gracefully bow out of the way when you have more important things to do then it is just Linux behaving the way it is supposed to.

I am not so sure what they do, whether they cought it up or keep it, but it does seem that after some use things go back to normal. However it does take about 5 minutes for things to 'assimilate' :D .

I find it very hard to believe that it is in fact a bug in KDE as I am sure that it would have been discovered before, I mean it is so obvious.

Here is my top:

3:02pm up 1 day, 2:27, 4 users, load average: 0.27, 0.29, 0.17
60 processes: 57 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 4.5% user, 3.9% system, 0.0% nice, 91.4% idle
Mem: 384664K av, 373084K used, 11580K free, 0K shrd, 1072K buff
Swap: 779112K av, 37412K used, 741700K free 64472K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
22355 root 15 0 37672 35M 17896 S 0.1 9.5 0:10 mozilla-bin
22325 root 15 0 16596 16M 10800 S 0.0 4.3 0:00 konsole
511 root 5 -10 277M 14M 6612 S < 1.5 3.8 9:49 X
712 root 15 0 18156 12M 11136 S 0.1 3.3 0:34 kdeinit
22249 root 15 0 16552 12M 10772 R 1.7 3.2 0:00 kdeinit
708 root 15 0 17008 12M 11484 S 0.0 3.2 0:09 kdeinit
699 root 15 0 15244 10M 9808 S 0.0 2.7 0:20 kdeinit
695 root 15 0 15224 9.8M 9544 S 0.0 2.6 0:01 kdeinit
726 root 15 0 15100 9.8M 9636 S 0.5 2.6 9:21 kdeinit
717 root 15 0 14224 9464 9096 S 0.0 2.4 0:02 kdeinit
720 root 15 0 14012 9012 8844 S 0.0 2.3 0:00 kdeinit
677 root 15 0 13348 8756 8396 S 0.0 2.2 0:01 kdeinit
698 root 15 0 13184 8560 8260 S 0.0 2.2 0:00 kdeinit
693 root 15 0 13236 8512 8288 S 0.0 2.2 0:02 kdeinit
736 root 15 0 12980 8028 7732 S 0.0 2.0 0:00 kalarmd
675 root 15 0 12184 7892 7612 S 0.0 2.0 0:00 kdeinit
672 root 15 0 11168 6912 6736 S 0.0 1.7 0:00 kdeinit
669 root 15 0 10952 6664 6572 S 0.0 1.7 0:00 kdeinit
691 root -51 0 4340 3828 2924 S 2.9 0.9 37:59 artsd
700 root 15 0 3972 3380 2860 S 0.1 0.8 3:02 gkrellm
421 xfs 16 0 6644 2504 1128 S 0.0 0.6 0:14 xfs
721 root 15 0 2692 2204 2028 S 0.0 0.5 0:01 pam-panel-icon
22251 root 15 0 1500 1500 1144 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 bash
22327 root 15 0 1476 1476 1236 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 wvdial
465 root 15 0 1784 1180 1180 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 gdm-binary
22349 root 16 0 1120 1120 940 S 0.0 0.2 0:00 run-mozilla.sh
22465 root 15 0 1092 1092 872 R 0.1 0.2 0:00 top
566 root 15 0 1128 992 992 S 0.0 0.2 0:00 startkde
22336 root 15 0 860 856 732 S 0.0 0.2 0:00 pppd
361 root 15 0 684 568 568 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 xinetd
371 root 15 0 588 560 524 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 crond
306 root 15 0 552 512 472 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 syslogd
624 root 15 0 680 508 484 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 ssh-agent
725 root 15 0 496 472 436 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 pam_timestamp_c
1 root 15 0 492 464 444 S 0.0 0.1 0:03 init
310 root 15 0 452 440 400 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 klogd
390 root 15 0 416 388 368 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 gpm
459 root 16 0 408 368 368 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
460 root 16 0 408 368 368 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
461 root 16 0 408 368 368 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
462 root 16 0 408 368 368 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
463 root 16 0 408 368 368 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
464 root 16 0 408 368 368 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 mingetty
696 root 15 0 328 292 280 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 kwrapper
2 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
3 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kapmd
4 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 ksoftirqd_CPU0

and you can see kdeinits at the top of the list!!!

here is cat /proc/meminfo

total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 393895936 382816256 11079680 0 1142784 72105984
Swap: 797810688 38309888 759500800
MemTotal: 384664 kB
MemFree: 10820 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 1116 kB
Cached: 64564 kB
SwapCached: 5852 kB
Active: 83740 kB
Inact_dirty: 19984 kB
Inact_clean: 13760 kB
Inact_target: 23496 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 384664 kB
LowFree: 10820 kB
SwapTotal: 779112 kB
SwapFree: 741700 kB
Committed_AS: 102424 kB

What do you think? Is this normal, or is there are HUGE leak? Once again I find it so hard to believe that it hasn;t been noticed before if it is a mem leak, I mean i must not be the only person using KDE and not switching off my machine?

Maybe this will help, seems this is something KDE is aware of these kdeinit processes lingering around after you close a program but they haven't really done anything about it, but to make aware this is going off someone else's word in mailing list on a site I found.

http://www.egr.msu.edu/archives/publ...er/006979.html

You could try shutting off the cron and at daemons to see if something is running over-night that suck resources. You could also run ps aux and find the pid's and more specific info on what each instance of kdeinit is referring to - like which one is kicker etc. Then kill and restart each one and see if one in particular frees up the mem.

HTH

How about updating KDE? Are you using the stock version (3.0 I believe)?

Yeah, I am using the stock version, but I think that this will happen on other versions too, since I have searched kdeforums.org and I see some references to this...

I am going to try and upgrade however, and see what happens.