Performance degradation after KDE runs for sometime

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Saturday, November 13, 2010 01:10:18 Rex Dieter wrote:
> >  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
> 
> Looks like the top 3 aren't kde applications.  Try quiting/restarting
> these?

Sorry for the delay, I wasn't around yesterday... :-)

Ok, so I exited from firefox, skype and emerald (replaced it with
default kde4-window-decorator). The swap usage dropped halfway, from 1 GB to 
0.5 GB. Some memory also got released. This is the new top output:

top - 21:27:10 up 12 days,  4:21,  4 users,  load average: 0.21, 0.25, 0.31
Tasks: 184 total,   1 running, 183 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 12.7%us, 11.9%sy,  0.0%ni, 75.2%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2048088k total,  1845144k used,   202944k free,    33668k buffers
Swap:  4192956k total,   537340k used,  3655616k free,  1093460k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                                         
15276 vmarko    20   0  624m  81m  23m S  0.0  4.1   0:18.03 okular                                                                                                                                                                          
 1739 root      20   0  472m  77m  25m S 20.9  3.9   4700:18 X                                                                                                                                                                               
 2021 vmarko    20   0 1396m  69m 9760 S  5.3  3.5 910:19.04 ktorrent                                                                                                                                                                        
 9797 vmarko    20   0  810m  59m  21m S  0.0  3.0   0:51.88 kmail                                                                                                                                                                           
15242 vmarko    20   0  543m  58m  23m S  0.0  2.9   0:04.16 kile                                                                                                                                                                            
 2222 vmarko    20   0  727m  24m  12m S  0.0  1.2  13:53.29 cairo-dock                                                                                                                                                                      
 1998 vmarko    20   0  938m  22m  10m S  5.0  1.1 958:46.41 plasma-desktop                                                                                                                                                                  
15152 vmarko    20   0  676m  21m  13m S  0.0  1.1   0:14.63 kde4-window-dec                                                                                                                                                                 
15170 vmarko    20   0  420m  19m  12m S  0.7  1.0   0:03.23 konsole                                                                                                                                                                         
 2053 vmarko     9 -11  565m  18m  16m S  6.0  0.9 297:56.92 pulseaudio                                                                                                                                                                      
 2022 vmarko    20   0  420m  11m 7744 S  0.0  0.6   0:02.00 fusion-icon                                                                                                                                                                     
 2346 vmarko    20   0  188m 9.9m 3024 S  1.7  0.5 198:32.22 compiz                                                                                                                                                                          
15525 vmarko    20   0  271m 8512 6000 S  0.0  0.4   0:00.07 kio_http                                                                                                                                                                        

The system regained some responsiveness, but still appears mainly sluggish.

The problem isn't the actual load, but the fact that memory consumption 
increases without bound over time. I'll try to use Konqueror for a day instead 
of Firefox, and I'll try to refrain from keeping skype and emerald running. If 
the swap usage keeps increasing, the culprit is somewhere else... I'll wait 
and see.

Best, :-)
Marko