Performance degradation after KDE runs for sometime

[Garry T. Williams]

On Sunday, November 14, 2010 16:52:54 Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> 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

[snip]

> > 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.

Maybe not.  It looks like another Gig would do it.

My money is on ktorrent.  It's filling up the cached memory, I bet.
That stuff is probably also being used as peers request blocks from
your client.  The system gradually pages out pages from other
applications to make room for ktorrent pages in cached memory.
Eventually you use one of those apps and it page faults a bunch of its
memory back in before it can respond.

You might try clearing the cache.  From a root prompt, type:

    sync; echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Or maybe stop running ktorrent altogether to see if that helps.

Stopping and restarting firefox on a regular basis will help, too.

-- 
Garry T. Williams