Performance degradation after KDE runs for sometime
Marko Vojinovic
vvmarko at gmail.com
Fri Nov 12 22:43:56 UTC 2010
On Friday, November 12, 2010 22:14:34 you wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I traced the issue down to swap usage --- after a couple of days of
> > running, *something* seems to gradually fill the memory with junk
>
> Run top and type "M". That will sort process by their resident memory
> usage. It won't had to spot the offender.
Ok, sure, I've been advised to do this before, and I've done it many times,
but somehow I'm not any smarter after looking at top output. Maybe I am
reading it wrong, but it just confuses me even further. Here goes, sorted by
memory usage:
top - 22:16:38 up 10 days, 5:11, 5 users, load average: 0.38, 0.45, 0.37
Tasks: 200 total, 1 running, 199 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 10.4%us, 8.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 79.9%id, 1.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2048088k total, 1657424k used, 390664k free, 18640k buffers
Swap: 4192956k total, 1038432k used, 3154524k free, 566580k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2528 vmarko 20 0 2029m 171m 19m S 1.3 8.6 564:19.55 firefox
2397 vmarko 20 0 366m 148m 7460 S 1.3 7.4 230:40.39 skype
2366 vmarko 20 0 565m 92m 3044 S 0.0 4.6 12:10.68 emerald
5723 vmarko 20 0 989m 82m 17m S 0.0 4.1 10:29.49 kmail
1739 root 20 0 471m 59m 11m S 19.9 3.0 3780:01 X
2021 vmarko 20 0 1380m 57m 9476 S 6.3 2.9 780:37.22 ktorrent
2016 vmarko 20 0 293m 42m 8176 S 0.7 2.1 137:01.00 skype
2222 vmarko 20 0 789m 28m 5436 S 0.0 1.4 11:05.85 cairo-dock
1998 vmarko 20 0 937m 20m 8824 S 4.3 1.0 804:03.95 plasma-desktop
2603 vmarko 20 0 546m 18m 7088 S 0.0 0.9 1:39.64 kile
22635 vmarko 20 0 480m 12m 6452 S 0.7 0.6 43:06.53 konsole
2053 vmarko 9 -11 501m 12m 11m S 0.3 0.6 259:54.25 pulseaudio
10764 vmarko 20 0 455m 8572 4608 S 0.0 0.4 1:07.09 okular
32679 vmarko 20 0 285m 8528 5616 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.11 kio_pop3
So what do you make of it?
First 14 processes take up (together) 37.4 %MEM. Except for the last one (I
have no idea what is kio_pop3), all of those are active simultaneously on my
desktop most of the time.
I have 2 GB of RAM and 4GB of swap, and apparently most of the RAM is used up
and an extra 1 GB of swap. So what apps are using up the remaining 62.6 %MEM?
Is there a way to list all processes, sorted by memory usage? Top truncates
the output to the height of the terminal, and I would really like to see if
the %MEM is actually summed up to 100 for all processes.
By the way, does MEM column refer to RAM or RAM+swap? In any case, I don't see
why my 10+ apps, using a total of 37% of memory can force the system to use
1GB of swap, on top of 2GB RAM.
Is there a way to check which pages (belonging to which apps) are being
swapped out? Furthermore, is there a way to understand why is this being
done? What is occupying all that RAM if Firefox and KMail are routinely
swapped out and thus behave in an extremely sluggish way until they finally get
focus (and get swapped back to RAM)?
I guess it should be a sane system policy that apps currently open on the
desktop not be swapped, unless there is no more RAM for all of them. But all
my desktop apps take up only 37% of that RAM, so why do they get swapped out
in the first place?
I'd appreciate any clarification on this matter.
Best, :-)
Marko
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