Hi all,

I find from time to time that when an application I am using closes the audio device and reopens it (say xmms has just finished playing one song and moves onto the next), in the intervening time a process called aplay belonging to knotify opens the audio device and starts hogging lots of cpu time. In the meantime, the audio application I was using now cannot open the audio device, and says something like "/dev/dsp cannot be opened".

I usually solve the problem by forcibly killing this aplay process. If I kill its parent, knotify, then it simply restarts itself soon after.

My question is, what is this knotify thing? And why is it doing what I am describing here? Also, is killing the process as I am doing a safe way to solve the problem?

Many thanks!

I too have come across a similar problem with knotify. It takes up to 95% of the CPU. From what I have found on the Net, kdeinit is involved. I have also been coming across about kdeinit and memory leaks. I have yet solved the problem.

It hasn't done it to me for quite a while now. Haven't done anything to fix it though.

Completely unrelated to the thread, but I gotta share this with someone before I burst: I've just written a program to play Archimedes tracker tunes (similar to soundtracker mods) on my linux machine! Not finished yet but essentially working. Permission to feel chuffed, captain?

I may have figured it out. If you go into the KDE configurer, and look at LookNFeel-->System Notifications, this is the same icon that knotify has when it appears in the task list in KDE system guard.

I went and turned sound off for every notification that was set to play a sound, since there's clearly a bug in the aplay program (it doesn't close the sound device and keeps running, hogging lots of cpu time) and maybe this will be an end to the problem?

I wonder what the notification was that was triggering it? No message was ever displayed.

I finally worked it out!

The reason aplay didn't let go of the sound device was because it uses the aRts sound server. The sound server goes idle after a preset length of time, unless you have it in full-duplex mode, in which case it keeps running all the time. Needless to say, I had it running in full-duplex mode. Turn that off and the problem disappears. Alternatively, set all sound applications to use their aRts outputs, if they have them; that also works.

I expect the particular notification that was triggering it was probably email arriving.

Is there away to completely disable notifications in KDE?