Performance degradation after KDE runs for sometime

[Garry T. Williams]

On Friday, November 12, 2010 17:43:56 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.

[snip]

> 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?

These top processes are, together, allocated over 10 GB of virtual
address space.  On a 2 GB physical memory machine, you are almost
certainly going to page.  Also firefox with flash has been known to
consume memory without bound.  Some Web sites are designed poorly to
cause Javascript to consume memory without bound.

It is clear from above that the 2 GB memory on this machine is over-
committed.  Add more RAM.

On Friday, November 12, 2010 17:52:12 Patrick Boutilier wrote:
> 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

Do not do this.  The processes above will *not* fit in 2 GB.

Also the size of cached is almost certainly coming from ktorrent,
judging from the CPU time it has accumulated.  The file data it reads
from the network is being held around in anticipation of it being
useful soon.  It probably isn't.  Cached will be reclaimed when needed
by a process.

On Friday, November 12, 2010 20:10:18 Rex Dieter wrote:
> Looks like the top 3 aren't kde applications.  Try
> quiting/restarting these?

Yup.

-- 
Garry T. Williams