Accumulating swap over time

[Douglas Phillipson]

I think I figured out what is causing my swap problem.  I was rotating 
through a bunch of pictures with the "slide show" feature for my 
background screen with KDE.  After a little while my memory got full and 
swap fully used.  Then memory would release but swap usage remained.  So 
there might be a memory leak in KDE's "Desktop Background" slideshow 
code.  If I disable the slide show it doesn't occur.

Thanks for the opinions

Doug P

Mike McCarty wrote:
> John Summerfied wrote:
> 
>> Douglas Phillipson wrote:
>>
>>> Running FC4 kernel 2.6.14-1.1653_FC4smp.  I seem to accumulate a 
>>> large amount of swap over time.  (A few days.  I'm not running any 
>>> unusual apps.  My memory stastics (xosview) says I have gobs of free 
>>> memory but after a while, even with a gig or more of free RAM my swap 
>>> goes up to several hundred megabytes and things slow way down.  The 
>>> disk swaps madly and then backs off for a while.  It seems to be 
>>> cyclic in nature but the swap never goes away until a reboot.  At all 
>>> times I have in excess of a gig of free RAM.  The only apps I'm 
>>> running are Firefox, Thunderbird, openoffice 2.0, perhaps a music 
>>> player on this machine under KDE 3.5.0.
>>
>>
>>
>> AFAIK Mozilla (and probably derivitives) leak memory fairly badly. 
>> I've reported it to mozilla.org (as have others), but not knowing how 
>> not to have the problem I can't describe to them how to have the 
>> problem, and they didn't seem very interested.
>>
>> Here are my memory hogs:
>>
>> 13973 summer    15   0  407m 201m  15m S  1.7 41.3 327:17.73 mozilla-bin
>>  6200 root      15   0  240m  35m 2292 S  4.0  7.3 203:13.70 X
>>  5959 summer    15   0  189m  34m  10m S  0.0  7.1   5:17.81 
>> thunderbird-bin
>>  7491 summer    15   0  210m  34m  18m S  0.0  7.0  20:37.67 soffice.bin
>>
>>
> 
> My system looks very similar...
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  4155 root      15   0  195m  31m 4000 S  2.2 13.2   2385:07 X
> 13937 jmccarty  16   0  134m  31m   9m S  0.0 13.2 104:53.28 
> thunderbird-bin
> 26893 jmccarty  16   0  133m  21m 9644 S  0.0  8.8   4:52.89 mozilla-bin
>  4517 jmccarty  15   0 30836 9648 4160 S  1.9  3.9   2:27.15 gnome-terminal
>  4462 jmccarty  16   0 44300 7476 3692 S  0.0  3.0   1:32.43 nautilus
>  4470 jmccarty  25  10 33868 5872 2548 S  0.0  2.4   5:23.62 rhn-applet-gui
>  4403 jmccarty  16   0 15316 4164 3220 S  0.0  1.7   4:34.03 metacity
>  4515 jmccarty  16   0 22104 4096 2932 S  0.0  1.7   2:41.79 wnck-applet
>  4460 jmccarty  16   0 26960 3996 2752 S  0.0  1.6   1:08.55 gnome-panel
> 
> All the rest is (individually) less than 1%.
> 
> Mike