Performance degradation after KDE runs for sometime

Fri Nov 12 22:52:12 UTC 2010

On 11/12/2010 06:43 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> 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?

You have almost 400M free and almost 600M cached. Not sure why so much 
goes into swap. What are the results of the free command after running 
this command?

swapoff -a && swapon -a

>
> 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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