Performance degradation after KDE runs for sometime

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Saturday, November 13, 2010 05:01:36 Garry T. Williams wrote:
> 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
> 
> > 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.

Well, it doesn't seem to be overcommitted for the first four days of running, 
with all those apps. Apparently there is a process among these which uses more 
and more memory as time passes, without bound, and eventually forces 
everything else to swap. So adding more RAM is not the solution, it would just 
postpone using of swap for another week maybe.

The problem is that this shouldn't happen in the first place. If I can 
successfully use the machine with 2GB of RAM for the first week, why isn't that 
state maintained indefinitely? I don't usually add any more load than this, and 
the machine seems to handle it without problems initially. But something keeps 
eating away RAM, slowly but without bound. :(

As for Firefox with flash, I know, but I need a browser open all the time. 
Restarting it doesn't seem to help much. Any suggestions on how to 
combat/workaround this issue? That is, short of rebooting every day?
 
> 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.

I know. At least they won't fit *now*. They all *do* fit in 2 GB after a fresh 
boot or logout/login into X. But give them two weeks, and...
 
> 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.

So you are saying that ktorrent should not create problems I'm having, right? 
If cached mem can be reclaimed, I believe that would happen *before* the 
system resorts to using swap? Or am I wrong here?

Best, :-)
Marko